A Vow to be Faithfully Ironic: Materialism and the Magical Rhetoric of Feet

ABSTRACT: This essay mediates the two most prominent kinds of materialism in rhetorical studies with the concept of irony. Although a materialism of instrumentality, represented in the work of Dana Cloud, and a materialism of immanence, represented in the work of Ronald Walter Greene, are fundamentally incompatible, I suggest that both can be understood as helpful and productive modes of criticism if held in ironic tension with one another. Ultimately, I argue for the necessity of both materialisms. KEYWORDS: Materialism, Marxism, Cloud, Greene, Irony, Mediation

The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

---Karl Marx (1990, p. 103) The story is told of an old Italian woman who arranged a hotel room in such a way that she could materialize spirits of the dead, even though her hands and feet were secured by three scrupulous observers from the Society for Psychical Research (Feilding, Bradley & Carrington, 1909). On eleven different occasions in 1908, Eusapia Palladino sat at one end of the table and in front of a so-called "sance cabinet," which consisted of a pair of dark-colored, cashmere curtains hung across a corner of the darkened room. Although the British investigators were absolutely certain that there were no accomplices inside the room, during the sances a number of supernatural events occurred, from the movements of objects within the cabinet (such as a tambourine or guitar placed behind the curtain for this purpose) to the complete levitation of the sance table. Actually, it has been argued that Palladino was extremely skilled in the ways of misdirection and limb-substitution: all spiritualist phenomena were produced by Palladino's extremely dexterous and "sapient foot" (Polidoro & Rinaldi, 1998). One can imagine a critical counterpart to this investigation. The foot called "materialism" is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for any critic if it enlists the services historical materialism, which today, as we all know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.[1]

Or so Dana Cloud (2001) would have us believe, arguing that the so-called "poststructural"

materialism favored by some contemporary rhetorical theorists is best characterized as either "linguistic materialism" or abstract "matterism." These are fighting words, and they bespeak a current debate among rhetorical scholars about what materialism is and should be. Cloud argues that some rhetorical scholars who claim to do materialist work have abandoned fundamental Marxist principles and, hence, are not true materialists. For example, she suggests that scholars like Ronald Walter Greene have replaced class antagonism and the ontological primacy of concrete praxis, a fundamental Marxist concept that can be defined as human productive activity, with an attention to the "stuff" of bodies and inanimate objects becoming in discourse. Because of these substitutions, she claims that the ideological critique of materialist scholars has become too idealist, able to claim materialism only to the extent it misapprehends or simply ignores the true historical materialist tradition of Marx and Engels. Resigned to an "affirmative masquerade" for the sake of "progressive credibility," Cloud charges that self-identified materialist scholars are left settling for "playing with our identities in a mood of irony, excess, and profound skepticism" (2001, para. 26). Theirs is not an interest in the labor of feet, but the feats of a kind of idealist, rhetorical magic, the cause of which is "immanent in its effects" (see Althusser & Balibar, 1977, p. 189).

Such a characterization reduces materialism to a narrow understanding of critical practice, obviating the necessity of critical dialectics as the theoretical mediation of, for example, text and class struggle. In other words, such a characterization is antidialectical because the production of critical thought is forced to take a backseat to the production of class warfare. In this essay I argue against such one-sided (ultimately monolithic) materialism by suggesting that there is a way in which more orthodox Marxian and so-called "poststructural" materialists can converse with one another, particularly in the speakeasy of the ironic, but only insofar as both are drunk with the collaborative logic of mediation. Indeed, I characterize the rhetoric's competing materialisms as a challenge of critical mediation, as a contest between a hermeneutics of suspicion and a cartography of faith (Ricoeur, 1970, pp. 28-36), for which there is no direct rapprochement. To this end the essay proceeds in five sections. First, I detail the debate over materialism among rhetorical scholars by recounting Cloud's critique of the materialist position of Ronald Walter Greene. Although Cloud and Greene's positions are not representative of the discipline as a whole, detailing the ways in which their positions differ helps to explain the debate to the unfamiliar. Having detailed the debate as a dialectic of sorts, I then explain the concept of "mediation," which is central to dialectical thinking. Next, I describe how a trope very familiar to rhetoricians, irony, teaches us how to engage in the project of mediation. Finally, after I explain why the possibility of a socialist revolution is dead, I conclude by stressing the mutually constitutive (ironic) necessity of competing materialisms, as well as the need for faith in magical visions, in ghosts of the coming revolution.

Dancing with Professor D. In the essay "The Affirmative Masquerade" published in this journal, Cloud (2001) retraces the so-called "ideological turn" in rhetorical studies in order to show how the disciplinary adoption of ideology critique downplayed the materialist aspects, in particular the "economic determination of human action," a key premise of orthodox Marxism (para. 4). Of central concern in this renarration is the work of Michel Foucault, which Cloud argues is an outgrowth of an Althusserian structuralism that provides for the "relative autonomy" of superstructural elements from the economic substratum. Cloud argues that Althusserian (or "post-Marxist") theory was ultimately responsible for an "idealist shift" in materialist thought away from the empirically real toward ideology and discourse as a field of power (paras. 414).[2] Because Foucault, like Althusser, completely evacuates the subject of autonomy,

materialist critique is rent from real people in real struggle and, consequently, from an analysis of the successes and failures of a rhetorical agent in a given "rhetorical situation." Cloud's general renarration is ultimately designed to lead us to her critique of the work of Ronald Walter Greene (1998; 2002, 2003a, 2003b), a scholar whom Cloud argues has "recommended that criticism eschew teleological concerns entirely" (para. 14).

Although Greene's (1998) conception of materialism is complex, in broad strokes one could characterize it as an attempt to posit a Foucauldian and Deleuzian notion of immanence in place of critical modes premised on surface/depth (viz., interpretive) logics. Gone is the logic of representation, which Greene suggests requires critics to understand critical objects as deceptions that must be exposed to liberate a more hidden, primordial substance or truth. In its place is a logic of articulation (how different elements of reality at multiple levels of abstraction are connected to one another, by either force or chance), which enables the critic to map the governance of populations (which could be a given class) by a "governing apparatus." Gone is the traditional communication model, which seeks a "reconciliation of self and other" through instrumental rhetorics. In its place is a monistic, Spinozian web of power comprised of circulating "bodies, texts, and forms of cultural literacy" within which we are constituted as subjects (indeed, there is no outside). Although the economic becomes one of many modes of governance, and although class becomes subsumed by the more flexible category of "population," such an understanding of criticism remains material because discursive formations and governing apparatuses are real; the evidence is in the effects.[3]

Cloud's critique of Greene's conception resembles the criticisms often made of Foucault: insofar as subjects are constituted in discourse, there can be no account of agential instrumentality, nor can any critical standard emerge with which to adjudicate competing truths, however contingent we may deem them to be (the problem of rhetorical agency after the invasion of poststructuralism has been obsessively written about; see Biesecker, 1992; McKerrow, 1993). The result, Cloud points out, is a dehabilitating, defeatist brand of relativism. Once one embraces a hermeneutic (or rather, a cartography) of faith, that there is no determining logic behind materialism, one must abandon precisely that element of historical materialism that Burke held was the central, persuasive source of class awakening: the "scientific" inevitability of the coming crisis and consequent revolution (Burke, 1969b, p. 101). Greene's urging us to abandon a hermeneutic of suspicion means that there is "no truth underlying discourse," that all we are left with is the machine of productive discursive formations. Because "discourses manufacture what is 'in the true,'" Cloud argues Greene's materialism "does a disservice to people who struggle against exploitation and oppression." In the end, Cloud urges, "we need to call a lie a lie," lest critical praxis abandon the political and become "pessimistic."

Cloud is not, however, enlisting the services of Platonism by insisting on the ontological fact of the lie, that people can and do deceive. Her recourse is to Marx in a Nietzschean moment: Humans "must prove truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice" (Marx, 1978b, p. 144). Truth is not an outcome of power/knowledge, but a product of struggle born of naked will-to-power that begins in "practical, human-sensuous activity"-that begins in human praxis (Marx, 1978b, p. 144). She clarifies with the example of Nixon's lying to the public in his "Vietnamization" speech. Because "Greene's approach assumes that what is in the text is 'in the true,'" argues Cloud, "there is no relevant extra-textual evidence against which textual truths can be weighed and evaluated." It does not follow that, therefore, Nixon did not lie, but rather, that Nixon's presentation of the "truth" was but one of many other possible presentations. This troubles Cloud. "We need extra-discursive reality checks," she argues, or criticism goes nowhere (2001, para. 19). We need to be able to call Nixon a liar.

Notwithstanding the problems of understanding just what a materialist praxis is (there is, again, no consensus among scholars), what Cloud offers is not so much a defense of the moral imperative of communication--the reconciliation of self and other through rhetoric, the communing of souls--but the possibility and necessity of a "this-sidedness" critical activism premised on the alienation of selves from themselves, an activism of pissed-off-ness based on a lived experience of alienation. As Marx notes, "the dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question" (1978b, p. 144). Cloud bids us to return to this Marxian dictum, that human productive activity is the ultimate basis of any theoretical and critical project, that action should precede theory. In this light, Cloud's praxis becomes a criterion of truth in the same sense popularized by Engels: "before there was argumentation, there was action . . . . The proof of the pudding is in the eating" (Petrovic, 1998, p. 440).

On Mediation as the Central Problematic of Rhetorical Materialism

What is ultimately at stake in this debate is the practice of rhetorical criticism itself. Cloud's pointing up the centrality of lying is particularly apropos because the practice of rhetorical criticism is unavoidably suspicious. As a fundamentally explanatory and interpretive practice, rhetorical criticism is necessarily premised on the notion of rhetoric as deception or misdirection, and in this sense Plato was, of course, right. As C. Jan Swearingen (1991) has noted,

Dissimulation and deceit, alluring fiction, pretty lies, cunning duplicity, strategic understatement . . . : these avatars embody traits and themes our Western literate-textual culture has traditionally viewed as being imparted by rhetoric, inherent to literature, pervasive in public discourse, and intrinsic to language itself. (p. x)

The last line here is a nod toward Nietzsche's assertion that language itself is a lie "in the nonmoral sense," which is widely assumed among rhetorical scholars, or at least in the fairly innocuous notion that representation has its limits (Nietzsche, 1982). Even in the absence of such a belief, the existence of the critic as such demands a logic of representation; the critic exists to articulate the "this-sidedness" of the critical object better than the object itself (Godzich, 1983).

Considered in this light, Cloud's critique of Greene's materialism returns us to an important question. The question is not whether critics should be "political activists," as one may be misled to pose in a moment of Adamite temptation (Kuypers, 2000). The question is an older one, best and first posed by Barnett Baskerville (1977): "must we all be rhetorical critics?" (my emphasis). Greene's answer, which curiously remains overlooked, is a resounding "no." Although the question is not addressed directly, I'm not so sure Cloud would disagree. Insofar as rhetorical criticism is framed as a demystifying practice, however, Cloud certainly believes that the rhetorical has an important role in any critical materialism: "critical scholars," she argues, "bear the obligation to explain the origins and causes of exploitation and oppression in order to better inform the fight against them" (2001, para. 27). For Cloud, it seems that rhetoric is one of the most conspicuous means by which oppression is maintained and potentially overcome.

Although the term is virtually absent in her most explicit discussions of materialism, Cloud (1994; 2001) calls for a critical/rhetorical practice of mediation. Of course, James Aune noted over twelve years ago that mediation is precisely the "rhetorical problem" of Marxism: "Marx did not explain the psychological and rhetorical prerequisites for revolution," nor did he prescribe a mode of criticism that helps to "fill the gap between what we might call structure and struggle" (1990/1999, p. 542), or as Jameson (1981) describes it, a brand of criticism that consists of the unmasking of relations between a formal analysis and its socio-cultural context. Insofar as one wishes to retain "rhetoric" as titular concept in any mode of criticism, the fundamental and primary problem of criticism and interpretation is indeed that of mediation--of exposing the relations between different levels of material reality through or with the critical object.

Abstracting this problematic to the level of interpretation as such, the critical difficulty of mediation is not unfamiliar to textual critics: the problem can be simplistically reduced in formalist terms to the text/context problematic that so interests scholars of political rhetoric (e.g., Leff & Kauffeld, 1989). To avoid being captured by the illusionary unity of a given text, falling prey to what Robert L. Scott (2000) characterizes as the "nihilism and anarchy" that are "just around too many corners" in worshipful attention (e.g., textual fetishization; see Lucas & Medhurst, 1999), however, there must be the ground of a kind of essence, a constitutive outside--that is, a context--with which to mediate lest one fall prey to the endless spiral of meaning that so aptly characterizes the project of deconstructionism. In other words, the logic of interpretation is inherently a logic of interiors and exteriors, of internals and externals that posits an outside for a sense of purpose and to stabilize meaning, however momentary and contingent. The outside posited by more orthodox materialist critics like Aune and Cloud is characteristically economic, and the task of critical mediation is either that of demystifying rhetorics that obscure the economic determination of human action (in the sense of establishing limits) or showing how particular rhetorics--especially those of the subclasses--are ultimately inspired by the kinds of alienation caused by late capitalism (for scholars of immanence, there is, of course, no outside to begin with; or rather, everything is outside).

Does critical mediation need to posit, however, the determination of the economic base as the ultimate outside? Walter Benjamin argued against the affirmative answer over sixty years ago, suggesting that the quest for homologies or overly formalistic parallels among multiple levels of social reality in fact obscured the instrumental possibilities of collective fantasy (utopics) with a plodding determinism, thus offering either resignation or blind eschatology as the only possible choices for those for whom the revelations were intended (for Benjamin, one does not motivate activism by arguing for a better world for one's grandchildren, but by reminding people of their past enslavement; 1968, p. 260; also see Gunn, 2001). Benjamin undoubtedly committed himself to navigating the empirical reality of real people in concrete struggle; but he also believed that agency was articulated by the ideological world of social forms, which one can crudely reduce for the purposes of brevity to the possibility of agency of the subject on the one hand, and the ideological articulation of the subject on the other.[4] Benjamin navigated this familiar pickle by denying any transparent homologies between the superstructure and the base. In The Arcades Project, one finds that Benjamin explicitly denied the homology as a conceptual pursuit: It seems, at first sight, that Marx wanted to establish here only a causal relation between the superstructure and infrastructure. But already the observation that ideologies of the superstructure reflect conditions falsely and invidiously goes beyond this. The question, in effect, is the following: if the infrastructure in a certain way (in the materials of thought and experience) determines the superstructure, but if such determination is not reducible to simple reflection, how is it then--entirely apart from any question about the originating cause--to be

characterized? As its expression. The superstructure is the expression of the infrastructure. The economic conditions under which society exists are expressed in the superstructureprecisely as, with the sleeper, an overfull stomach finds not its reflection but its expression in the content of dreams, which, from a causal point of view, it may be said to "condition." (1999a, p. 392) The utility and consequences of replacing reflection with expression are well known. Culture expresses or represents the arrangement of the base, and determines it in the sense of establishing limits. It is here, at the question of homology, that rhetoricians have the most potential for contribution: If mediation is simultaneously a project of articulation and demystification, and if the relationship between a text and its social ground is necessarily deceptive in character, then the critical mechanism that articulates the two cannot be singularly symbolic, a translation of this for that, a facile assertion that this or that rhetorical act is, in the end, in response or in reaction to exploitation. Rather, critical mediation must be dialectical and in this sense doubtful of its own articulations, concerned especially with the possibility that these articulations can harden or ossify into ineffectual, one-sided dogmas that obscure the real experience of real people in struggle. In other words, Benjamin urges us not to be too sure of our mediations.

The upshot of this move can be expressed in terms of a critical vision: this self-doubting or reflexive dialectical materialism must abandon the almighty metaphor in favor of the duplicity of irony. Mediation is no longer the task of replacing this for that, or articulating this textual remnant to that economic stimulus, of ferreting out the lie in relation to a universal. That is Progress (or in Burkespeak, a rotten perfection). Rather, critical mediation becomes a dialectic of fetching the truth (or the positivity) from the lie (the negation), placing irony as the privileged ontological form of critical praxis. In this sense, irony reflects a dialectic with no sublative or no transcendent moment.

Towards the Ironization of Form

The irony articulating our competing materialisms is secured with a common negation of what Gaonkar has termed "the arrival of the text" (1989). Cloud argues against the "textual politics" underlying the "discursive turn," suggesting that absent a reference to the reality of exploitation in the Real, there can be no progressive political program. Similarly, in his championing the productivity of power, Greene argues against textualism, which is understood as a continual unmasking of rhetorics of domination. On the one hand the floating city of textualism lacks grounding in blood, muscles, and brains; on the other, textualism produces predictable criticisms and becomes caught in its own deconstructive devolutions.[6] Similar materialist battles have been waging in other disciplines for some time--notably cultural studies--and one only need consult the most recent work of Lawrence Grossberg for the broad strokes.

Insofar as one resists the Romantic exodus from text and finds some value in retaining the notion as a commonly accessed reservoir of meaning on multiple levels of abstraction (see Forns, 1999), and insofar as the category of the Real is indispensable, then our task remains one of mediation, of discerning the relations between rhetorics as representational artifacts and non-representational "recalcitrance," to borrow a term from Burke. As Gaonkar has noted

The issue [the problem of mediation] cannot be resolved by a mere methodological

gesture . . . that acknowledges the existence of non-discursive practices, but proceeds to unpack discursive practices in relative isolation. The pressing task, for which 'textual studies' are ideally suited, is to offer an understanding of 'contexts' (non-discursive formations) through a reading of texts (discursive formations) while allowing the text to retain its integrity as a field of action. (1989, p. 275) Of course, Gaonkar's understanding of text is much broader than that of more traditional rhetorical critics, functioning much like a form (or discursive formation) arbitrarily bounded by the critic in the act of criticism. Regardless of how one conceptualizes the text, however, the traditional, materialist way to mediate, so elegantly outlined by Fredric Jameson, is to dissolve the inside/outside dichotomy by ferreting out contradictions in the empirical text (deconstruction), which in turn allows for a series of sublative thrusts into new "horizons" of critical thought (reconstruction), which, ultimately, culminate in the identification of the "ideology of form," which in turn contains the residue or ghosts of cultural revolution (the most significant detritus being that of late capitalism itself; 1981). Such a project, of course, requires a constellation of texts and, in the end, book-length projects.

Is there a way to condense "textualist" logic, however, to a critical nubbin? With nods to Burke and Benjamin, I suggest that irony is an apt but necessarily imperfect condensation. As the master trope of dialectical criticism, a return to the ironic has the added benefit of bringing more rhetorical scholars into the project.

Irony is a figure of speech that demonstrates, with considerable clarity, the logic of dialectic and the power of language to undermine agency and intent, even when intentionally deployed. The concept is rooted in the Greek eirn, which means "dissembler" or one who disguises and conceals. Since Plato's attack on rhetoric as the art of flattery and deception, there has been a longstanding association of rhetoric with irony (Swearingen, 1991).

Defenders of the rhetorical tradition, however, have tended to describe irony as one of a number of rhetorical devices that can be used to good effect. Cicero, who discussed irony with the Latin equivalent, dissimulare, or "to dissimulate," defines irony as "the humor of saying one thing and signifying another." He notes that using irony is especially pleasing if one manages it well, but it can also have disastrous consequences (1986, bk. 2, sec. 252). In her exemplary study of the trope, Linda Hutcheon (1995) locates the "unbearable slipperiness of irony" in the fact that some audiences fail to recognize when a rhetor or author intends to be ironic, and further, that the "pleasing effect" lauded by Cicero is derived precisely from that risk-"irony's edge." Using irony as a verbal strategy is only successful if it is "stable," which Wayne Booth (1974) defines as an ability to be "reconstructed" by readers or an audience in a way that does not invite them to impute unintended meanings. In the most straightforward sense, as an ironist, the challenge is to make sure one supplies enough reconstructive cues to the desired audience such that they will not be encouraged to fabricate a meaning that is not intended. Given the risk, obviously there are also unstable and unintended ironies, situations when someone attributes humor or dissimulation when it is not intended, thereby undermining the control of the ironist. Cham Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) describe this "unbearable slipperiness" as a formal paradox:

Irony always presupposes supplementary information on facts, or norms. . . . Thus irony cannot be used if there is uncertainty about the speaker's opinions. This gives irony a paradoxical character: using it implies that argumentation is necessary; but in order to be able to use it, a minimum agreement is required. . . . Irony is all the more effective when it is directed to a well-defined group. Only by having some idea of the beliefs held within certain social environments can we guess whether or not a given text is ironical. (p. 208)

Uncertainty or simply a lack of knowledge about the rhetor or author will likely guarantee the failure of ironic strategy.

One can begin to see how irony as a textual feature can become folded into a materialist project when reading Kierkegaard's (1989) treatise on the trope, The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates. Kierkegaard suggests that verbal irony contains an implicit hierarchical arrangement that is intimate with the social order. He says that

ironic figure of speech has [a] property that characterizes all irony, a certain superiority deriving from its not wanting to be understood immediately, even though it wants to be understood, with the result that this figure looks down, as it were, on plain and simple talk that everyone can promptly understand; it travels around, so to speak, in an exclusive incognito and looks down pitying from this high position on ordinary, prosaic talk. (pp. 248249) At issue in the deployment of irony is power, especially that which would maintain or create social order. Just "as kings and princes speak French, the higher circles . . . speak ironically so that lay people will not be able to understand them . . ." (Kierkegaard, 1989, p. 249). Hutcheon refers to this classed dynamic as the "politics of irony," the social, structuring work of irony. This politics is particularly dangerous because, unlike "metaphor or allegory, which demand similar supplementing of meaning, irony has an evaluative edge and manages to provoke emotional response in those who 'get it' and those who don't, as well as in its targets and in what some people call its 'victims'" (1995, p. 2). The psychic pleasure of "getting it" is inversely proportional to displeasure of exclusion. For these reasons, Kenneth Burke (1969a) associates irony with "drama" and observed that, from a retrospective, historical gaze, irony can be used as a prophetic formula among the "characters" in an given social order. "There is a level of generalization at which predictions about 'inevitable' developments in history are quite justified," says Burke.

We may state with confidence, for instance, that what arose in time must fall in time (hence, that any given structure in society must "inevitably" perish). We may make such prophecy more precise, with the help of irony, in saying that the developments that led to the rise will, by the further course of their development, 'inevitably' lead to the fall (true irony always, we hold, thus involving an 'internal fatality,' a principle operating from with, though its logic may also be grounded in the nature of the extrinsic scene, whose properties contribute to the same development). (1969a, pp. 516-517) Irony derives its power from its risks--potential misfires and unintended victims--and thus entails a degree self-destructive potential. Coupled with the highly emotional response individuals have toward irony, it makes sense that the anxiety of individuals who do not "get it" would be more noticeable in reactive texts than with other figures of speech. Because a cartography of discourse is most productive when it successfully locates points of conspicuousness, an analysis of the reactions to verbal irony seems a likely place for traces of Other-anxiety.

Given its "prophetic" element, it is not surprising that for Burke another god-term for irony is dialectic. The significance of the association of dialectic with irony cannot be over emphasized. For Burke (1969a) the relationship between irony and dialectic is twofold. First, although communication itself is a dialogic phenomenon, verbal irony is an exaggerated dialogic trope in the sense that its discriminating function not only excludes others, but it necessarily needs "the fool," as Burke put it. Insofar as irony is used to establish authority

among an elite group who "get the joke," for example, ironic authority needs disbelievers and the misunderstanding rabble.

Second, "only through an internal and external experiencing of folly could we possess," argues Burke (1969a) "sufficient 'characters' for some measure of development beyond folly"--viz., "getting it." Hence, the association of dialectic with irony also refers to the power of its symbolic thrust, the ability of irony to push the reconstructing audience to other places, other sites of meaning, other texts, particularly past experiences of not getting it or being played the fool, all of which are other realities or texts not in the here-and-now. We can term the symbolic thrust of irony its dialectical invitation or quality.

In an important parallel sense, the intertextual character of irony can be used to describe the dialectical element of textual criticism, the Gadamerian "merging" of the pre-understanding and contextual horizon of the interpreter and the contextual horizons of discourse: in the interrogation of texts and "the Other," one ends up interrogating the self, the present contextual field of consciousness. "What goes forth as A," Burke (1969a) professes, "returns as non-A" (p. 517). Characterizing "dialectical thought," Jameson (1974) argues similarly that "the essential movement of all dialectical criticism . . . is to reconcile the inner and the outer, the intrinsic and the extrinsic, the existential and the historical," which allows "us to feel our way with a single determinate form or moment of history at the same time that we stand outside of it . . . . " (pp. 330-331). Thus the methodological problem of moving from a given text into the intertextual order can be wed at the site of an ironic knot; the relationship between the content of texts and their collective meaning in discourse is formal. As Jameson (1974) puts it, "form is itself but the working out of content in the realm of the superstructure" (p. 329). Irony is not merely a trope, but a formal, social dynamic of discrimination that has the power to move consciousness to different levels of abstraction.

Insofar as textual irony is discriminatory, insofar as it is an essential double in the realm of meaning, irony is the most conspicuous location of contradiction--that place in any given text where social discrimination might disclose precisely the residue of some underlying social structure as well as the ways in which that structure is concealed. What is most noticeable in the deployment of irony is precisely the development of textual identities: these can be "classed," but not necessarily, as race, gender, and other nodes of identity formation might also delineate the "Other" of the text. More importantly, however, is the irrecoverability of the determining structure in the temporality of the text (a break with historicism), the irony of investigating the past. The past, of course, only makes sense in relation to consciousness of the present, our consciousness. As Benjamin (1968) put it, criticism in this sense stops "telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, [the historical critic] grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the 'time of the now' . . . " (p. 263). In the context of irony as the master trope of a rhetorical materialism of mediation, another way of putting this is that as human beings who happen to be critics, most of us have been "played the fool" in "real life." In this way we are united with the excluded Other of the text--those whom the text negates--in a kind civil pedagogy of humiliation. This is the motor of materialist criticism, if not criticism in general, this notion of the elusive oppressed Other. The problem is that the Other changes over time; our attempts to essentialize the Other as an oppressed class, for example, is an inescapable (but necessary) tendency of abstraction when placed within the framework of instrumentality, of struggle.

The Dispiriting Floundering of Revolutionary Resurrections

[Fanaticism] was a Judaic-Christian invention. And it is strange to think that in receiving this malady of the soul the world also received a miraculous instrument for raising societies and nations from the dead--an instrument of resurrection.

--Eric Hoffer, from The True Believer (1989, p. 168)

During a group presentation in one of my courses recently, three undergraduate students posed a very difficult question to the class: "Why does Hegel think [that] as a society and the state become more progressively civilized, the systematic completeness of the understanding is gradually eroded and, in this respect, language becomes poorer and less refined?" Whole dissertations, if not lives, could be spent answering this very question, not to mention the thorny problem of deciding just what is being asked (as Hegel might insist, answering the question depends on what one means by progress, civilized, systemic completeness, understanding, refined, and language). Presumably, a general response would be something like the following: Insofar as civilizations become increasingly cognizant of absolute knowledge--an awareness of the movement of World Spirit--the necessity of differentiation (of negation) would cease in some super-duper sublation; history would end in the achievement of universal freedom. One student's stab at an answer, however, was more interesting: "Doesn't this understanding have something to do with intelligence and stupidity?" she asked rhetorically. She went on to make the case that Hegel's understanding of self-knowledge was something like intelligence, and that at the end of history "dumb people" would become smart. "I mean," she continued, "didn't Hegel say [that] he had absolute knowledge and [that] it was the job of us dummies to figure it out?" Scholars "young" or "left" and "old" or "right" are, of course, divided on the issue.

What is particularly interesting about this student's response to Hegel's frequently impenetrable prose is its resemblance to Cloud's critique of "critical" and "materialist" rhetorical theory: these newer materialisms are too "idealist," which is code for the inability of theoretical abstractions to capture a sense of real people in real struggle. Rather than helping individuals formulate political blocs, Cloud claims (voicing Said) that these new materialisms have an "astonishing sense of weightlessness," resulting in "a kind of floundering about that is most dispiriting to witness" (Cloud, 2001, para. 14). To wit: governmental apparatuses do not march in the street; rather, they function as difficult rhetorical schemes that replicate class divisions within the academy, largely on the basis of "getting it" or "not getting it," at the expense of the uninvited colleague and/or the oppressed and beguiled undergraduate.

This critique of idealism goes much deeper than the fetishism of theory itself, however. It begins with Marx's critique of the Hegelian dialectic as a closed-system of self-alienated ideation: If we begin with Mind, then the subject of becoming "emerges as a result . . . [and] real man and real nature become mere predicates--symbols of this or that unreal man and of this unreal nature" (Marx, 1988, p. 162). Such a model forecloses the possibility of an objective human being that is not always already self-alienated (Marx, 1988, p. 155), or at least, as my student noted, insofar as an individual is incapable of mastering Hegel's verbose and tortuous achievement of absolute knowledge. Against the Hegelian negation of being with the no-thing internal to it, Marx forwards a Feuerbachian substitution of real being for the abstract. Besides, insists Marx, "a being which has no object outside of itself is not an objective being" but a "nullity," and with the evaporation of Spirit, God, and the rest of it, nullity in this sense is absurd. For Marx, Hegel's dialectic was "standing on its head"; returning it to feet entails a complete denial of the split between the spiritual being and natural being in consciousness, replacing it with praxis, the materiality of the production of such a thought prior to the self-consciousness of such a division. Just as the use-value of a

commodity only obtains such value after use (Marx, 1990, p. 126), so a self-consciousness of thinking must necessarily be the product of material, human productivity.

Although physical matter in motion--a component but not the whole of the Real--is in the last instance the basis of all materialisms, as an orthodox Marxist Cloud's critique of competing perspectives must be based on that interiority which is external to any given economic system: concrete or useful labor, which, for Marx, is the essence of human becoming (or at least insofar as labor is alienated productivity, as he would later come to believe). For Marx (1990) there is something like brute labor, which results in "being," and there is useful labor, which transforms "motion" into something objectively real ("material"; p. 296). Hence human productivity is essentially telic: it is the expenditure of human productive power toward some material end. In traditional Marxian terms, when this end is situated within the modern economic mode of production, it becomes a commodity. Although the premise that history is the chronicle of class struggle seems far removed from the transformation of concrete labor into the commodity, both are, in the end, intimately related. In a capitalist mode of production, the objectification or materialization of useful labor into the commodity is the precondition for exploitation because of the abstraction (variously "objectification" or "transformation") or movement from quality to quantity--from concrete labor to its homogenization as "labor-power" measured in terms of "labor-time." The move allows for a kind of slight of hand by the capitalist that helps to generate surplus value. Although Marx's (1990) theory of value has been hotly contested and continues to invite debate, it is this mismatch between compensation and the expenditure of labor, enabled by the material processes of abstraction (or "transformation"), that simultaneously fuels the expansion of capitalism (globalization) and widens the gap between the ruling class and the subclass. In a contrapuntal fashion, the potential for revolutionary consciousness increases as Capital continues to expand. Reduced and admittedly simplified to its most naked predictive logic, the end of false consciousness will be heralded by Capital's last crisis of overproduction, that moment in which the capitalist can neither expand nor exploit any further. In other worlds, the revolution of the free association of producers is an outcome of Capital's ceasing to move, of not being able to forestall or recover from crisis.

I believe this traditional Marxian narrative forms the basis of Cloud's understanding of historical materialism. In print, however, she rarely engages the ontological commitments of Marx's theory of value. Productive doing or praxis is maintained consistently as the ultimate outside (the Real), and theorizing is held--as it was by Aristotle--in tension with it. Although she is more measured elsewhere, in "The Affirmative Masquerade" Cloud tends to valorize the historical progressivism or "science" behind The Communist Manifesto, conflating the "historical" of historical materialism with that of class at the expense of the inner-logic of the inevitability of struggle, the dialectical or philosophical component of materialism as a logic or law of movement premised on the mismatch of concrete labor and abstract labor as detailed in the first volume of Capital. The result is an elision of a fundamental point at which completing, so-called "post-structuralist" materialisms begin: not only has the objectification of labor become literally immaterial by definition (e.g., "information"; see Hardt & Negri, 2001), but the coming crisis of all crises has been absorbed, not as an event, but as a condition of Capital's continued stability, particularly in the age of neo-liberalism. Thinkers like Greene and Grossberg consequently maintain that this radical transformation can only make sense in equally radical terms. Crudely put, these terms should be immanent and antitranscendent insofar as there is no where for Capital to go, for example. There is no sublative moment in dialectic precisely because we are already "there," or better, "here." Having achieved global status, "Capital no longer looks outside but rather inside its domain, and its expansion is thus intensive rather than extensive" (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 272). Capital is not a transcendent force.

Of course, geographical locations do remain open to expansion, and the post-Marxist move to a totalizing globalism is a bit premature on empirical grounds. Yet from the vantage of keeping-pace with the transformations in our life-worlds, the move seems as warranted as any. The move is not, as it would seem, an abandonment of the "really real" in pursuit of the abstract ideal, but rather, the acknowledgement that objectification or abstraction is, in fact, the really real that older vocabularies fail to grasp. As Althusser reminds us, for Marx abstraction is as material as the concrete (e.g., concrete and abstract labor are real). Cloud rightly observes that "poststructuralist discourse theories have left behind some of materialism's most valuable conceptual tools," namely, standpoint epistemology, the interests of class, and, most fundamentally, the "extra-discursive reality checks on ideological mystification and economic contextualization on discursive phenomena" (2001, para. 27). Yet these "tools" have been abandoned for reasons that were well known by the Frankfurt theorists over seventy years ago: The proletarian revolution did not happen. Auschwitz happened. Our task as materialist critics is to figure out why this is the case, why the science of Marx was a theology, why revolution traditionally conceived is impossible, and why hope cannot be located in the chronicle of humanity or the register of the Real. The totalizing domination of discourse seems as good of an answer as any.

Concluding Remarks: Toward a Utopic of Theological Foolishness

All social life is essentially practical. All the mysteries which lead theory towards mysticism find their rational solution in human praxis and in the comprehension of this praxis.

--Karl Marx (1978b, p. 145) . . . an unsparing look at our losses can do more than depress. It gives us a sense both of what a possible post-Marxist radical movement won't and can't look like, and what, if there is to be one, it will look like. . . . a movement aiming at significant change will be a politics of identity as well as a politics of social structures and power. . . . a new radical movement will abandon the notion that it is theoretically and practically focused on a single decisive area of human oppression . . . .

---Ronald Aronson (1995, pp. 179-180)

Although Cloud's critique of rhetoric's many materialisms--especially those offered by Raymie McKerrow and Ronald Walter Greene--is deliberately polemical and provocative (and in this sense productive), it also reflects a modernist conceit as typical of orthodox Marxist scholars as it is philosophical realists: this is my position, it does not evolve, and you should adopt it. Unlike Capital, which, in the orthodox formulation, must move, expand, and continuously exploit the producing animal to avert the always-looming crisis of overproduction (Marx, 1978a), agonistic materialism favors the ossification of struggle all the way up: fighting for ideas is homologous to the antagonism of class; academic disagreements begin to simplify into "two great hostile camps," the (petty?) bourgeoisie intellectual dancing

rounds at a "postmodern . . . masquerade ball," and the (old-school Marxist) proletarian busy watching the work of shuffling feet. Even given my own "modernist" commitments (e.g., my need to retain the categories of rhetoric, the unconscious, and so on), I think it is a mistake to dismiss the critical labor of post-Marxists; theirs is an attempt to comprehend praxis too, even if it is no longer located in human essence. Besides, most who claim materialism would agree that the end of human suffering is the goal, that this identification with the ungraspable Other is the motivation. Ultimately we begin, then, not with history, but with a shared moral ground. In this respect, there is room enough for multiple materialisms.

Even though there is a speakeasy, the work of mediation is more often to occur in the company of social lubricants in real-space than in the neatly edited pages of our journals. There is no reconciliation between an instrumentality that needs an interior and exterior, and a plane of immanence that maps movement in horizontal terms. My argument for an ironic mode of mediation attempts to incorporate the instrumentalist and the discursive turn as incommensurate yet indispensable modes of criticism; one interpretative, the other, cartographic. In light of the explanatory power of newer materialisms, in my view only a nonsublative meta-dialectic will be able to hold on to rhetoric at all.

My argument for an ironic mode of mediation is also dialectical, but not in the Hegelian sense that deflated the rhetorical promise of Marxism itself (or rather, precisely in the largely unreceived Hegelian sense of "the negation of the negation"; see Zizek, 1989, pp. 173-178): although there is a thrusting, there is no moment of sublation; there is no moment of reconciliation; there is no revolutionary turn; there is no way out. Post-structural modes do seem Romantic at times in terms of their "radical break," but I am admiring of these efforts in precisely the way Richard Rorty (1989) argues that we should be: new languages mark new possibilities. Sometimes, it is refreshing to move into new idioms of critique because fretting over agency gets tiresome.

I suspect part of my own suspicion of productive/spatial materialisms is marked by my own horizon of optimum complexity, a problem that I undoubtedly share with--to borrow something else from Rorty--the bulk of us worker bees and ants. Just because I do not understand some of it does not mean I must disagree with it. Like Cloud, however, I cannot let go of instrumentality, even after the crisis of hope and the resulting impossibility of a large-scale revolutionary praxis. I am, in the end, a comrade.

After monumental atrocity, the failure of Communism, and the ascent of neo-liberalism, after our existential awakening in that familiar, coppery stench, we must admit that the potential for macro-political movements is actually (literally) dead. Where, then, should a materialist hope be cultivated? There are reasons for replacing Benjamin's Turk with a maternal trickster, for replacing the new and strange with an all-too-familiar that deceives us with conjuring tricks. Yet these reasons should not be mapped symmetrically lest we fall prey to the promise of paradise and the hardening of will in the service of sleuthing and slaughter.

To conclude: In the eleventh sitting with Eusapia Palladino, Everard Feilding was astonished by the seemingly "supernormal" movements of the curtains of the sance cabinet. After noting that a "little stool" was placed beside Palladino at her request, Fielding wrote:

I saw the curtain move then on to the medium. I could see a perfectly clear space between the chair of the medium and the curtain. . . . This was the first time I have seen the curtain blow

out under such absolutely evidentiary conditions. I was sitting beside it; I had at 10:11 [p.m.] pulled it right away from the medium so that a clear space of a foot was between it and her, visible right down to the carpet, the bottom of the curtain being gathered together in a bunch away from her foot. . . . I watched the curtain continuously throughout, and suddenly the whole of the left edge of the curtain, i.e., the edge nearest her right shoulder, rushed out and completely enveloped her right side. (1963, p. 249) The mention of feet in both senses provides an ironic clue. At some level Feilding knew the spiritual phenomena were produced by Palladino's skillful feet, and yet he maintained for the rest of his life that her productions were "playthings of the [supernormal] agency which they reveal." The very incompatibility of fraud and faith, of feet and phantoms, then, is productive, indeed, is instrumental, but only when the one locates utopia in the materiality of consciousness and history.