(Re)Vitalizing Berlin

I've been reading Byron Hawk's 2007 book A Counter-History of Composition: Towards Methodologies of Complexity (Pitt) with a good deal of excitement lately. The "counter" or contradictory impulse in Hawk's counterhistory is his attempt to rescue vitalism from the "forgotten history" dump to which it has been relegated in historiographies of rhetorical theory since about 1980.

What happened that year specifically, according to Hawk, was that three extremely influential articles were published: Richard Young's "Arts, Crafts, Gifts, and Knacks" (in Aviva Freedman and Ian Pringle, eds., Reinventing the Rhetorical Tradition, 53-60 [CCTE, 1980]), James Berlin's "The Rhetoric of Romanticism" (Rhetoric Society Quarterly 10.2 [Spring 1980]: 62-74), and Paul Kameen's "Rewording the Rhetoric of Composition" (Pre/Text 1.1-2 [Spring-Fall 1980]: 73-94). Hawk identifies Young as the one who--drawing on a 1975 dissertation by one of his students, Hal Rivers Weidner, and first disseminating his views in an influential NEH postdoctoral seminar in 1978-1979--first buries vitalistic rhetorics as assuming that "creative processes ... are not susceptible to conscious control by formal procedures" (quoted in Hawk 22) and therefore in some sense are not rhetorics at all. For Young a rhetoric is an art or a techne, a process enacted with conscious control, and he believes that vitalism vitiates such control. In Hawk's paraphrase and commentary (drawing on Kameen's article): "Though Young does not use the term romanticism in 'Paradigms and Problems,' his reading of vitalism has questionable supports. One says the individual writer is not in control of invention (32) and the other says some aspects of invention cannot be taught and exist in the writer (32n5). Both positions may have associations with some romantic philosophies, but neither has any clear connection to vitalism" (23).

What is vitalism, then? Here is Hawk's summary:

While vitalism has romantic variations, at its roots it is theoretically and historically distinct. The fundamental question that cuts across all vitalisms is "What is life?" Each episteme, period, or paradigm answers the question of life differently according to its own situation and within its own discourse, but they are all trying to come to grips with what drives self-organization and development in the world. Historically, the general answers have ranged from an animistic, abstract, or mystical power that exists outside of and operates on the world, to an evolutionary and physio-chemical process that operates in the world, to a complex combination of material, biological, historical, social, linguistic, and ultimately technological processes that produce emergence. Life is situated in the relationships among these bodies and their forces. Rather than seeing life as an autonomous force, or as caused by physico-chemical or purely biological processes, this latter [read: last] view [complex vitalism] situates life within complex, ecological interactions. I see in each of these answers two key assumptions: that life is fundamentally complex (and that complexity must be accounted for or addressed) and that life is fundamentally generative (force, energy, will, power, or desire is central to this complexity). (4-5)

The first thing I note about this description is that my somatic theory is vitalist. The generative "force, energy, will, power, or desire" that drives the organization or regulation of (social) life in somatic theory is the somatic exchange, the circulation of shared evaluative affect through the group. Since my construction of somatic theory owes a lot to Deleuze and Guattari, on whose complex vitalism Hawk relies heavily as well, I suppose this isn't surprising.

The second thing I note, though, is that--at least so far, and I'm only on page 79 in the book--Hawk doesn't seem to be interested in constructing a vitalist counterhistory of composition. His counterhistory seeks to redress the "forgetting" of vitalism, and thus to reinsert it into our historical understanding of the field, but it is itself not vitalist.

For example, in chapter two, his careful tracing of James Berlin's historiographical trajectory in his books and articles from the eighties, Hawk cites William Desmond in Beyond Hegel and Dialectic to the effect that "The thought of everything other to thought [in Hegel's dialectics] risks getting finally reduced to a moment of thought thinking itself" (7, quoted in Hawk 74). Hawk comments:

Berlin's use of dialectics and mapping is also susceptible to this charge. Everything the historiographer attempts to mediate is reduced to that historiographer's framework. In thinking his or her Other--history--the active, engaged historiographer is thinking himself or herself. This folding back onto the self, this inability to finally attend to the Other, creates the inevitable blind spot as a result of Berlin's mapping. Dialectics is always self-dialectics: the self's interpretive framework is always to a certain degree reductive to that particular perspective; Berlin's maps will let him see only what he wants to see and, therefore, will necessarily forget the Other, history. (74)

Now obviously Hawk is critiquing Berlin with his own "particular perspective" in mind, his own "only what he wants to see": he wants to show how Berlin sidelined vitalism. But how vitalistic is it to suggest that this blind spot or this forgetting is Berlin's alone? That Berlin "forgets" vitalism because he wants to--that he is an isolated individual with a "particular perspective" and an individualistic intellectual agenda that he alone desires?

Berlin is working at this point in his formulations with a tripartite conceptual framework, dividing rhetorical theories into "objective," "subjective," and "transactional." The referents of these adjectives change over the eighties, but ultimately "objective" rhetoric is current-traditional, "subjective" rhetoric is expressivist, and "transactional" becomes social-epistemicist. Presumably because Berlin uses these terms to categorize rhetorics, Hawk too uses them to analyze Berlin's historiographical categories. At first this just means turning Berlin's categories back on him: "His way of dealing with this 'paradox' of competing dialectics--of arguing for openness and totality, of arguing against objectivity, then calling for it--is not surprisingly to imply a dialectic of dialectics" (75). But then Hawk seems to buy into those terms, identifying the inevitable (and for Berlin salutary) failure of objectivity as "subjective history": "Nevertheless, the subjective history must operate as if it were objective" (76).

Hawk then goes on in his next paragraph to call the "objectivizing" uptake of this "subjective history" a "problem": "The problem is that even if historians take this stance--realizing that in theory their maps are not total while using them as if they are--in practice readers can and will take the maps as total" (76). Yes, all right. But my question is: shouldn't a vitalist take on this recognize the complexity of the social interactions that produce these results? Aren't Berlin's interactions with the people he reads and the people who read him part of an intellectual economy that circulates value and collective desire? Is it really a problem that the thousands of readers influenced by Berlin took him to be describing "reality" "objectively"? It is if you're an objectivist yourself, who believes that vitalism should be in this history, and that its omission is therefore an objective error--a product, in other words, of subjective bias. If you're a vitalist, interested in the complex ecology of desiring-machines that produce "reality," surely this whole field looks very different?

But then I wonder: perhaps Hawk is leery of committing the imitative fallacy? Maybe he thinks his argument against the subjective-but-objectivizing exclusion of vitalism will be more effective--more persuasive to objectivizing academic readers--if he objectivizes it? Maybe he's afraid he'll sound like a crackpot if he writes more like Deleuze and Guattari? Doesn't in fact the whole concept of the imitative fallacy come out of an antivitalist tradition, an objectivizing tradition that wants to set it up as a negative exemplum in order specifically to warn us off vitalism?

Also, couldn't it equally well be argued that in invoking subjectivity and objectivity in his critique of Berlin on subjectivity and objectivity, Hawk is committing the imitative fallacy anyway?

Not, in fact, in vitalist perspective. Viewed vitalistically, the scene in which academic agents invoke objectivistic criteria in order to accuse others of subjective bias is itself a collective agent or agency, a desiring-machine, that perpetuates its values and ends by circulating them (and the regulatory pressures that maintain them) through the group. In this view, Berlin sidelines vitalism in the eighties not because he wants to (though his desire might certainly serve as the agency of a collective agent) but because "the field" wants to; and "the field" takes his construction of the history of rhetoric as objective truth not because of some "error" (subjective bias) Berlin committed, but because the exclusion of vitalism was somehow crucial to the desiring-machine that was "the field" at that time. Hawk is able to critique that construction now, and win the Winterrowd prize for doing so, because "the field" (the comp/rhet desiring-machine, especially as it begins to pay more attention to affect) wants him to--but wants him to do so objectivistically, because obviously objectivism is the sign and seal of academic discourse.

Doesn't that sound crackpotty? "The field" as a desiring-machine that wants Hawk to write a certain critique in a certain style? If I'm right, that feeling you have that this is the way a crackpot thinks (and theorizes) is the sign that I am right: that there is a collective agent that continues to condition us to objectivize, and to valorize objectivizing arguments as worth taking seriously (and giving academic awards to), and to feel uneasy when anyone deviates too sharply from those collective norms.