H O L D I N G / R E V I E W E S S AY

Cory Holding

Review Essay
Affecting Rhetoric
The Transmission of Affect
Teresa Brennan Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism

Sharon Crowley Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.

Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect

Denise Riley Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

Days before the presidential election in 2004, I sat for a homily at a church in Tempe. The sanctuary was large, the pews rammed end to center. Having accompanied my friend to church a number of times and become used to a certain variety of homily, I was surprised when the priest stepped out from behind the podium and began, As most of you know, I cant tell you who to vote for because I abide the separation of church and state advanced in our countrys Constitution, and paused. But I can tell you what values we support as an institution, and what issues it could be construed as mortal sin to support. There came a certain straightening of backs, and with that his continuation,

CCC 59:2 / DECEMBER 2007 317 Copyright 2007 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

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the litany of platforms from homosexuals right to marry and contraception to partial-birth abortion and stem-cell research. With each careful itemization, the priest proffered anecdotes and evoked startling images and the Word of God to clearly illustrate the values the congregation was meant to espouse, as well as the goodlier candidate for the job. Throughout the homily, the congregation seemed more or less rapt, nodding periodically and clapping during more pregnant pauses. Some people seemed moved near to tears (some to tears), and with the homilys close erupted a great and echoing surge of applause. I offer this by way of introduction not because I suspect the priests homily contributed to the outcome of the election, nor even because it seemed particularly effective (one could argue the congregation knew where it stood vote-wise far prior), but because I think it illustrates a certain drawing on the gut for rhetorical effect, and if the rhetor should have his way, for effecting social change. It seems, at least, a reasonable starting place for characterizing what could be called visceral force, or the push and pull of the bodythe affective or gut mediation in rhetorical swells. Consider, for further illustration, a highly politicized (and now long familiar) example from within the field, in the form of Edward P. J. Corbetts examination of The Rhetoric of the Open Hand and the Rhetoric of the Closed Fist, which evinces the potential punch of visceral force (and the relevancy of this for the field) in a couple of ways. First, in describing these forms he explains, The open hand might be said to characterize the kind of persuasive discourse that seeks to carry its point by reasoned, sustained, conciliatory discussion of the issues. The closed fist might signify the kind of persuasive activity that seeks to carry its point by nonrational, non-sequential, often non-verbal, frequently provocative means (Corbett 288). The closed fist, especially, rings of the gut to the extent that it is nonrational (extra- or maybe pre-conscious) and comparatively provocative (read also synonyms arousing or incendiary). Regarding the nonverbal aspect, he acknowledges that Aural, visual, and tactual images have an immediacy, an intensity, a simultaneity about them that words strung out one after another on a page can hardly achieve, underscoring what George Steiner disavows as retreat from the word in popular rhetorical communication, and the potential force of thusly derived body rhetoric (292). Second, in describing the coercive ability of the closed fist, not only does Corbett practically evoke gut force directly, paraphrasing Leland Griffin, but rhetorical activity [does] become coercive rather than persuasive when it resorts to the non-rational, when it is dependent, as he puts it, on seat of the pants rather than on seat of

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the intellect (293); but he does seem dearly to fear the closed fist, or at least apprehend its muscle: But it would be a simple task to demonstrate just how quickly the everyday world would unravel if man, the rational animal, were to abandon logic (296)that is, were to fight closed fist with closed fist, provocation with requite provocation. The questions stand to be asked: Whats to be gained in attending to visceral force in rhetorical production? Or to bodies in inventional practice? Or what if we acknowledge Corbetts distant prognosis that Any new rhetoric that develops will certainly have to give increasing attention to non-verbal means of communication (292), holds exigent for the political sphere today? Or what, now, could comprise body rhetoric? Consider, as gesture toward an answer, Brian Massumis suggestion that aspects of cognition, of knowing, happen in the body rather than the mind: The body doesnt just absorb pulses or discrete stimulations; it infolds contexts, it infolds volitions and cognitions that are nothing if not situated (Massumi 30). He further distinguishes, more complexly than can be aptly captured here, the important distinction between affect and emotion, suggesting, Affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is. Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the capture and closure of affect (emotion) (34). Affect then is emotive but pre-emotional, a volitional intensity produced and circulated between and among bodies and environmental factors, whereas emotion is the most intense (most contracted) expression of that captureand of the fact that something [momentary affect] has always and again escaped (35). Affect not only preconfigures emotion; it also comprises an interesting sensory aspect: For affect is synesthetic, implying a participation of the senses in each other. . . . Affects are virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing, particular things that embody them (35). What then if we consider affects emotive and sensory aspects in the shade of the closed fist of which Corbett speaks? Or in the evocation of beliefs (as in the opening example)? To what extent could or should visceral force, in such cases, be mobilized? What happens when we take into account Richard Marbacks complicated charge in response to compositions exclusion of closed-fisted rhetorics, that composition institutionalizes and internalizes social and political hierarchies and conflicts that complicate democratic negotiation by excluding contestatory rhetorics motivated by race, class, and gender inequities (Marback 196)? To what extent can or does body rhetoric yet muscle social change? And if body-affect

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does warrant rhetorical experiment, how should this inform traditionally cognitive approaches to rhetorical invention? The texts identified here resonate with recent criticism refuting Cartesian subjectivity as the condition of language and knowledge production and forge interventions by way of phenomenological theory of the body, continental philosophy, postmodern theories of embodiment, and even scientism and its kin. Specifically, each undertakes to explore the root of affect in and about the infolding social body as it comprises and constructs registers of the everyday, from the sensation of feeling untruthful even as you utter a truth (as Denise Riley explores in chapter 6 of her book) to the resound of the prospect of apocalypse for certain Christian fundamentalist factions (as Crowley explores in chapters 4 and 5 of her book). In attempting to answer whats to be gained in attending to affective tenor in rhetorical production, we drift between the texts, exploring each ones particular conception of affect (its work and character) and of affective transmission (or the mechanisms by which affect moves or acquires volition); as well as the way in which each puts pressure on the concept of self-contained subjectthat is, the extent to which affective force exceeds the subject to engage the social or political world. In examining each, we return to what any of this might bespeak for rhetorical practice. Of the three authors, Teresa Brennan in The Transmission of Affect gives us the most complete picture of affects character and the mechanisms for its transmission (the title rings). Drawing heavily on social science, psychoanalytic theory, and, to a limited extent, scientific explanation (especially neuroscience), Brennan suggests most cogently the contagious aspect of energy, the chemical-specific connectivity between bodies with each other and respective physical and social environments. Specifically, she characterizes affect as the physiological shift that accompanies a judgment (Brennan 6). She distinguishes this from feelings, saying, What I feel with and what I feel are distinct, and that the latter are articulable, sensations that have found the right match in words (6). Neither, as energetic material, is self-contained, and both, she explains, can enhance or deplete. They enhance when they are projected outward, when one is relieved of them; in popular parlance, this is called dumping . . . But the others feelings can also enhance: affection does this, hence the expression, warmth (6). Importantly, she connects this shift to the production of thought, explaining that while affects can evoke thoughts (find thoughts that suit them), thoughts are not tied in any specific way to the affects they evoke: thus, The point is that even if I am picking up on your affect, the linguistic and visual content, meaning the thoughts I attach to that affect,

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remain my own: they remain the product of the particular historical conjunction of words and experiences I represent (7). So the affect is both impersonal (transpersonal?) in infection and personal in situated, individual effect (translation to emotion, thought, then action). Along such vectors, social interactions come to change our biology, as described in the concept of entrainment (mode of transmission of affect) (10). The thrust of entrainment is illustrated in Brennans third chapter, Transmission in Groups, in which Brennan asserts, entrainment by olfactory and other sensory means accounts for situations where people act of one mind, and points to the reevaluation of hormones as transmitters of affect (52). Here, in what I would argue is the most stirring section of the book (and most surprising), Brennan makes clear what is at stake in (painstakingly) locating the mechanism for affective transmission in the first place, and more generally, in attending to bodily registers for the gestation of thought and action. Entrainment is defined as the form of transmission whereby one persons or one groups nervous and hormonal systems are brought into alignment with anothers (9). This concept invokes smell (and other sensory means) as a potential vehicle for effecting change in the affective constitution of other bodies (9). Pheromones, she says, act as direction-givers which, as molecules, traverse the physical space between one subject and another, and factor in or determine the direction taken by the subject who inhales or absorbs them. Changes in direction constitute intentionality in the most basic sense (75). One can imagine the implications for the rhetoric of the closed fistthe freight, as such, of numerous bodies occupying a certain space with vested (political or otherwise) interest. This chapter closes with Brennans poignant and (where concerns visceral force) exigent questionsin sum: If olfactory communication turns a hormone into a pheromone and changes anothers affects, does it also change their hormones in a way that (temporarily) changes their habitual affective disposition? Are such changes, in turn, communicated by additional pheromones? (72). But if affect is indeed transmitted, largely, as contagionas largely consequent to olfactory entrainment (66)what could possibly be the entry point for rhetorical intervention (or, no wonder Corbett worried the open hand would obsolesce!)? It is important to attend to social and political exigencies, which are facilely inferred, especially considering the numerous possible incitations (and historical instantiations) of group think. Brennan points out that although less invasively (intravenously), auditory and visual registers may play a role in entrainment, as exemplified in the process of installing an image in the mind

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(which becomes physically rooted in the brain and has been transmitted as surely as words whose sound waves or valence register in the air around the ears of those who hear [70]). Words and images, she explains, are matters of vibrations; transmissions of affect, a social phenomenon: sights and sounds are physical matters in themselves, carriers of social matters, social in origin but physical in their effects. Every word, every sound, has its valence; so, at a more subtle level, may every image (71). Images, in turn, can trigger a shift in hormone levels of onlookers, as in the case of, say, crowd violence (or crowd resistance to violence). This would, she suggests, only be amplified by the phenomenon of chemical entrainment. This seems at least one possible point of engagement for rhetorical interest (a charge Sharon Crowley more than eminently takes up): the point is that the behavior of hormones has a profile that fits with what we have learned so far about the transmission of affect; and what we have learned is that the transmissions affect the subjects intentionality, insofar as the subjects agency is composed of its affects or passions (76). That is, there seems a more direct route to the subjects agency than even emotion (traditionally rhetorics acutest and penetrating-most appeal), and that is to cut to the heart of affective being by means of sense appeal, or more precisely, by rendering, or invoking the biology of the other, as What is at stake is rather the means by which social interaction shapes biology. My affect, if it comes across to you, alters your anatomical makeup for good or ill (75). This in turn can be said to position bodies (if, for instance, pheromones and images can serve as direction-givers to the subject that absorbs them), which, when taken to the political domain, does present something of a case for attending to visceral force through rhetorical invention. Sharon Crowley, in Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism does just this. In this deftly articulated account of the discursive deadlock between liberalism and Christian fundamentalism (thorny straits she navigates without overly generalizing or dogmatizing), and in pursuit of common ground and civil discourse, Crowley explores the affect-derived intensities and passionate commitments that fashion belief, which manifests in turn as cultural practice and, urgently, political activism. Specifically, she suggests that deeply held beliefs are so tightly bound up with the very bodies of believers that liberals relatively bloodless and cerebral approach to argument is simply not persuasive to people who do not accept liberalism (Crowley 4). It seems important to emphasize her decision to locate belief somatically, rather than psychically, and to characterize it as bounded rather than inhabited, or deduced; this will serve not only to frame the disjuncture between the groups discursive styles,

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but also to introduce politics (and rhetoric) to viscerathe connate force of the believing body. Furthermore, Crowley seeks to restore rhetoric to the classical sense of political deliberation, to reinstall rhetorical invention (for its attention to values and emotion) as means to productive discourse between disparately dominant voices: Hence any rhetorical theory must at minimum formulate an art of invention, as Aristotle did; furthermore, the arguments generated by rhetorical invention must be conceived as produced and circulated within a network of social and civil discourse, practices, images, and events (27). This call to invention along lines more attuned to feeling sets the stage for upcoming chapters on the nature of belief (chapter 3) and apocalyptism as illustration of embodied belief (chapters 46), and for further exploration of affect-tempered discursive routes, as she suggests with the books closing line: I end with the hope that my readers will find, or open, many more paths of invention than I have been able to name here (201). The books third chapter, Belief and Passionate Commitment, comprises the portion in which Crowley most directly undertakes affect, and the extent to which bodies become (quite literally) bound up with a kind of pre-conscious, pre-cognitive belief that can wax political action. Here she begins by exploring the extent to which belief goes beyond the psychical; harking to Pierre Bourdieu for precedent, she suggests, Beliefs can be learned by means of discourse, but they can also be learned through adopting bodily positions, making gestures, and performing movements (69). This move to the embodied aspect of belief is further stipulated by Barbara Herrnstein Smith (and others) to comprise a distinctly social character: the constructive relations among environments, bodies, selves, and the formation/deformation of beliefs are continuously reflexive (69). Working backward from this supposition to belief s constitutive elements (by which to intervene), or the mechanism by which the habitual or social can be physiologically incorporated, Crowley broaches affect, borrowed in concept from Massumi, as a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that bodys capacity to act (82). Worth noting is the extent to which affect is prepersonal, or as with Brennan, one could say impersonal and volitional (as this would imply affect-inflected belief is to some extent beyond negotiation, as beyond the subjects witting decision). The definition of emotion, alternately, Crowley borrows in part from Antonio Damasio, who she reminds us has demonstrated (by way of neuroscience) that reason does not properly operate without emotion (82): emotions are body states that come about in response to environmental cues or messages from

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the brain and nervous system (82). Affect does the work of calling attention (conscious awareness) to bodily flux, to the relative strength or weakness of bodily responses to one another and to environmental cues (82). Both affect and its concentrated counterpart (emotion/passion), Crowley explains, are compulsory in belief making and sustaining. Borrowing extensively from psychologists Gerald Clore and Karen Gasper, Crowley explains that affect influences attention by directing ones focus toward events or objects that cause the acutest emotional reactions (quoting Clore and Gasper): such attributions then allow affect to serve as a basis for new beliefs or as validation of prior beliefs about the object (83). As such, Crowley deduces, there may become a feedback loop between emotion and belief, in which, for certain cases, Affect can substitute for reality itself (86); that is, Words, performances, images, and other representations appeal to the gut. They trigger emotional responses that can set off a chain of ideologic that can in turn arouse additional emotional response. The resulting affect may seem to underwrite the empirical truth of whatever conclusion is drawn (88). Offering for our inspection the brute force of guts in argument, Crowley underscores the ability of certain widely espoused beliefs to appeal directly to the pre-conscious (and pre-rational) and thus to wield far-spread (and viscerally perpetuated) cumulative force and effect, effectively setting the stage for coming chapters on the spread of apocalyptic beliefs (read closed fist) and Christian fundamentalisms in general. Taken to its logical crescendo, the mushrooming of certain strains of affect-inflected belief (as in apocalyptisms case), Crowley suggests, not only presents a real problem to rhetoric, but it poses a danger to democracy (13132). On the matter of engagement, she says, There is no rational or empirical way to prove an apocalyptist wrong, because her major premises derive from an ineffable source whose wishes are clear only to believers. Claims that support the worldview are endlessly reiterated: abortion is murder, gay rights are a threat to the sanctity of gay marriage, abstinence is a superior form of birth control (170). Appeal to reason, she explains, is not an answeris not the way to interrupt the feedback loop: Liberal reliance on reason and empirical fact is now being seriously challenged by this style of argument, which derives its truth claims deductively and guarantees them by means of their resonance, by a rightness that is deeply felt rather than rationalized (170). So if, crucially, it is true that Because of its refusal to tolerate many kinds of warrants, skepticism may not be a useful mode of resistance to apocalyptism . . . academic and scientific skepticisms may in fact accelerate the spread of fundamentalisms,

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may be one reason that apocalyptic beliefs of all kinds are embraced by more and more Americans (169), it would seem a solution need be posed, a common ground on which to establish democratic communications between the groups: an interruption. One provisional solution surfaces: attend to guts in making your argument. Crowley offers numerous such Proffers toward In(ter)vention (197), among them, the use of narrative and conjecture in garnering attention and addressing values in specific terms. In any case, hers is a call for careful attention to meeting places forged of words and bodies, of volitive locutions and the way they may be made material. Denise Riley, in Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect inspects ordinary linguistic encounters for such junctures in an effort to illustrate we are composed of language (it is autonomous even as we speak and intend to control it), that affect seeps from the very form of the words (Riley 2). She says in laying this bare, There is a forcible affect of language which courses like life blood through its speakers (1). Indeed, language for Riley is vital (you could say viral). It sprawls once said and seems able to infect: There is a tangible affect in language which stands somewhat apart from the expressive intentions of an individual speaker; so language can work outside of its official context. The speaking of language is far more than its resonances, its timbre, its insinuations, its persuasive cadences, or its spontaneous wit. It can kill (5). You might say (harking to Crowley) it can be gravely coercive. Language, as such, is impersonal: its working through and across us is indifferent to us, yet in the same blow it constitutes the fiber of the personal (1). In other words, while the power of words is impersonal, this very impersonality (the words force and histories) comprises who one is. Affect, thus, is more an outward unconscious which hovers between people, rather than swimming upward from the privacy of each heart (34). The nine thematically linked essays comprising this volume, Riley explains, are meant to listen to common twists of speech which in themselves enact feeling, rather than simply and obediently conveying it as we elect. And so they fray at the edges of that usual antithesis . . . between language as speaking us, and our status as freely choosing users of language (3). The chapters subjects range from hate speech and the consolation of remarking on ones former beauty to the niggling sensation one has of lying even when one isnt (as in canceling for a party when one really does feel nauseous) and living with a name one didnt pick. The chapters that are explored in further detail I have chosen because they seem to well illustrate both Rileys particular conception of affects infectiousness as well as its political acreage.

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Malediction encapsulates what Riley alludes to in the introduction as the impersonality of languagewhich nevertheless has as its life as internally as any other human tissue (7). In this chapter Riley captures affectinducing language as penetrating, performative, and possessive; and in the case of something like hate language, sadistic and harming. The chapter centers on injurious speech, and offers, by way of stripping a word of its particular virulence, a means to interrupt its charge. Regarding the way words strike viscerally, Riley offers, In its violently emotional materiality, the word is indeed made flesh and dwells amongst usoften long outstaying its welcome. Old wordscars embody a knowing it by heart, as if phrases had been hurled like darts into that thickly pulsating organ (9). But why do punctures last? Why should even the absurdest utterance lodge and endure? Plus how can they be so irrefutably coercive? Consider the example of domestic-as-linguistic violence: imagine someone who habitually ends up in a position of pleading with those deaf to all her appeals to act humanely, when it was long clear that they would not do so, yet at those dark moments it seemed to her that her whole possibility of existence was at stake in extracting a humane word from them, although in the past this had always proved impossible (14). Words, she suggests, even if you can overthrow their speaker (if you can realize one morning he is dead wrong), may themselves be the real Other, the darts that you cannot dislodge for your epiphany; they may instead reside in your inner speech to settle into . . . dense receptivity (20). Moreover, if bleakly, In this, Language or Word is Spirit. And if in addition we hold the word to be also historical and material, then the cruel word must also call us into social being if of a deathly kind. As for the possibility of our resisting it, the language hangs there, supremely indifferent as to whether it is resisted or not (22). So if one can conceive of certain hate language, for instance, as antiqued, as having long forerun its speaker, and as being an indifferently speaking stone corroding and decaying (26), one can perhaps imagine the impersonality behind the hate speech which can be harnessed for protective and quasi-therapeutic purposes (24). In other words, in recognizing the hate speaker as less than wholly in control of an utterance (as medium, you could say) and that the words spoken are dead things, the hearer could elude the words affective vector. It is, she suggests, a way to bolt from the secretive and unspeakable workings of linguistic harm (27). Chapters that suggest political implications for affect-inflected language include But Then I Wouldnt Be Here, which centers on pro-life rhetoric and the stifling appeal certain activists proffer in the form of Disagree with me,

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and you want me dead (105). In this chapter, which is fairly consonant with Crowleys criticisms of fundamentalist argument, Riley similarly suggests, For now the limits of the appeal to personal sensibilities as a ground for a liberal politics are suddenly and acutely in sight (108). Calling this category of argument unassailable speech, Riley explores the deadening effect this has on negotiation and productive conversation, calling it a linguistic showstopper that falls like a lead weight upon any exchange, and adds with characteristic rich humor, It could only be bumped back into life if someone who is similarly ontologically challenged else raises the retort Nor would Iand so? (112). The chapter Linguistic Inhibition as a Cause of Pregnancy explores the physical repercussions of the unspoken, beginning with the trickiness of talking protection amid sex. Here Riley observes that the unsaid, ushered by this unease, has very real material outcomes especially for the (quiet) female. The description of the silence is particularly stirring: In the pregnant stillness of anticipation before you break calamitous news, the inner word feels as if it were being moved forward as a waiting thing. It has become an object among objects studded across a messy landscape, a solid block of presence, which you as its coming speaker must heave laboriously into full-throated view (73). At this chapters close, Riley speaks briefly to the way this colors social and political upheavals, which always entail the end of accommodation in favor of verbal attack, linguistic disintegration, vehement terminological overthrow. Change hears and speaks the jarring, the tactless, the iconoclastic, and at its height it will bring thing-being unashamedly back into words (83). This suggests structures of power can have a direct effect on language production (or that particular words are channeled through certain structures of power), that language could be said even to constitute the source of power, and as such, can affect bodies with words and the spaces between words. Languages political effect is further evidenced in Your Name Which Isnt Yours, which focuses on the reflexive relations between being considered part of a (linguistic) category and behaving in response to that categorization (which comes to construct ones identity in part). This can happen, Riley explains, with categories benign as ones name, which is given us, and as with any word, comprises and carries its own ancient connotations and weight, and will as such affect us bodily (through its utterance and the feedback it induces). This chapter elucidates in no uncertain phenomenological terms the extent to which language fashions us through (though arbitrary) popular credence: In theory the named person submits, more or less gracefully, to this impersonality of her name, tacitly consenting to believe as if it were the personal moniker that it is

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not (116). This speaks moreover to the making prowess of political discourse: A first name is, in this respect, greatly unlike other kinds of words, on which repetition habitually acts oddly, even incalculably, on their original force (which is where both the power and the vulnerability of political diction lies) (122) (one might reflect on Axis of Evil). Political structures moving into bodies through language [bite] at the level of identification, self-description, and other impacted linguistic-emotional rhetorical forms which would, if unexamined, remain obscured by the thick curtain of the word ideology (6). Thus Riley sonorously, forcefully awakens in her reader awareness of words moving in and across her body even as she sits, of the funny nuance of words that make her. It is also subtly an invitation to follow, to attend to the body treading dutifully amid words plodding paths and limitless potency. In view of Crowleys suggestion that story is perhaps the most efficient means of garnering attention and that Aristotle says that examples are effective because they serve as witnesses (Crowley 19798), I want to close with an experience that to my mind demonstrates affective force gone brutal. When applied to more exigent, or pointedly political situations, it may show what is finally at stake in rhetoric of a closed fist, or in continuing to omit attention to the body in rhetorical invention (I am hoping for this to register on the slippery level of metaphor, at least). In the summer of 1998 I strolled through the humming dark in my college town en route to the apartment complex where my friends friend was having a get-together. Nothing struck us as amiss until we arrived at the friends floor, where a couple of police officers were beating a door with billy clubs and calling out to let them in. On seeing us, they said, Just go back downstairs! which we did. Now when we got to the street level, something had changed. A cluster was forming at the foot of the apartment complex, and nothing for a series of moments seemed quite clear, as the best I could figure was someone was performing in the center of us all, or someone was fighting, or hurt, but people seemed altogether too merry for that. The motive of the crowd of which I was (as the cluster expanded) now indelibly a part was totally unclear until I caught sight of a no parking sign across the street start to wobble. At first it was just that, a kind of tweaked rubber band effect, until I was surprised to see it snap at the root and be carried away. It could only have been infection, the way within minutes whole lampposts were teetering over, alongside parking meters and stop signs, and you know everyone seemed to be helping, kindly warning folks out of the way when something was near to tipping, and lending hands where more were needed. Probably you can see where this is going, and envision the turn to where the momentum

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goes savage, when couches and other living room furniture were dropped unannounced from balconies above, people took to using car hoods for vantage points and, later, to flipping cars, and eventually, the accumulated landmarks that by now included clothing were piled in the middle of the street and set alight. When the riot police combed through after Id gone, students (mostly) were forcibly removed, and a handful of them later expelled. To stay fixed on issues at hand, bodies have incredible cumulative force that (this example suggests) is irreducible to quiet minds calculating in lonely chambers. In the face of another election, it seems a place worth beginning, this attention to affects insistence and the pluck of the body.

Works Cited
Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004. Corbett, Edward P. J. The Rhetoric of the Open Hand and the Rhetoric of the Closed Fist. CCC 20.5 (1969): 288-296. Crowley, Sharon. Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. Marback, Richard. Corbetts Hand: A Rhetorical Figure for Composition Studies. CCC 47.2 (1996): 180-198. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. Riley, Denise. Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect. Durham: Duke UP, 2005.

Cory Holding
Cory Holding is working toward her Ph.D. in the Department of English and Center for Writing Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to this she earned an M.F.A. in creative writing at Penn State University. This essay is part of a larger exploration of the relationships between poetic and rhetorical invention and the body.

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