The End of Rhetoric
Walter A Lucken IV, Queens College, CUNY
11 June 2024
The field of rhetoric and composition studies utterly failed in its mission this year. When I say that we failed, I don’t mean that we failed to halt Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinian life in Gaza, which would be a useless observation given that we wouldn’t occupy such a central role in the United States university system to begin with if we had that kind of power, especially if there was any fear that we might use it in such a way. What I mean when I say we failed is that we failed, collectively, to embody any modicum whatsoever of our own stated values. Academic freedom, student protest, social justice, speaking truth to power, decolonization, antiracist pedagogy, you name it. I saw it all go out the window. I’m not speaking from a privileged moral position either, I’m going to spend the rest of my life ashamed of all the instances where I let things go out of fear of retaliation, with the concern of staying in a position where I can do some good as a secondary concern or post hoc rationalization. What use am I in this position though, if I can sit silently in a room where someone says “we’ve been hearing so much about the poor Palestinians” later claiming that “the guy who started the Palestinian movement collaborated on the Holocaust with Hitler”.
This, for me, was the end of rhetoric. The end of the idea that professional status as a teacher and scholar of rhetoric means anything good. If I can get terminated (as many colleagues have) for leaving the realm of “civility” in a discussion of a credible charge of ongoing genocide and crime against humanity per the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court respectively, I can only conclude that my job must be to either keep my words within bounds where this topic is concerned or say nothing at all. That’s what it means to be paid to teach ethical and effective language use. To watch my mouth or keep it shut altogether. The end of rhetoric.
Prior to this year, arguing in public (what we might term rhetoric as social practice) about whether something widely understood to be a genocide was in fact a genocide, was taboo. If there was a consensus that a given historical event constituted genocide, disputing whether it fits the definition was outside the bounds of civil discourse, rightfully so. Applying the label “genocide” to historical events which haven’t always been construed that way in the official (colonial) record, such as anti-Black racism and the colonization of Turtle Island might be controversial to a right-wing audience, but most liberals and moderates either pay those arguments lip service or ignore them altogether. For an easy example we consider the 1951 petition to the United Nations by the Civil Rights Congress which accused the United States of genocide against its Black citizens, which is not widely taught and often ignored in the “official record.” Reactionaries conjure their own genocide charges as well, from the “Silent Holocaust” of abortion to “White Genocide.” These charges carry such little weight intellectually that barely anyone outside their influence bothers to refute them. This year though, for the first time, in the global public sphere and on our campus, we witnessed the rhetoricity of the charge of genocide. Of course, genocide accusations against Israel are not a new development, but never before has the charge taken on such a potent force globally and within the United States, especially in our cities and campuses.
When I say the rhetoricity of genocide, I don’t mean that the charge should actually be up for debate or that there are two credible sides or anything horrible like that. I don’t actually believe in that view of rhetoric, where it is simply an instrument to deliver a given point of view which isn’t better or worse than any other. I think that’s nonsense and that a person who doesn’t actually believe what they’re saying isn’t doing rhetoric. Making an argument you don’t actually believe to be true is tremendously easy, anyone can do it and I’ve seen it done a thousand times this year. Convincing others of the real moral or empirical truth of a situation, however, is tremendously difficult, because there are rules. If you deceive the audience or an interlocutor, you push them away from the truth. Thus, doing rhetoric is hard.
The rhetorical charge of genocide doesn’t stop at the act itself, because according to the minutiae of international law and political theory a genocide is a concatenation of acts of governance and war policy, which in the last instance is fully imbricated with the perpetrating society and its institutions. Thus, the charge of genocide is fundamentally epideictic, in terms of how it indicts an entire polity. In the context of international law, the epideictic effect of the charge of genocide is to signify that a given nation is unable to internally police its own actions, that an entire society has fallen short of its universal human obligations internally and externally, that it has found the end of rhetoric. Many of the State of Israel’s defenders and critics have argued that viewing its actions in terms of how they uphold or violate international legal obligations or post-1945 liberal values of equality is inappropriate, in that the foundations of its self-concept take shape in diametric opposition to those values. The same is often said of the United States. Rhetoric finds its end in Gaza and Ferguson. The charge of genocide, perhaps applied in error to those constitutionally unable to respond, in effect demonstrates its veracity in this way. Rhetoric finds its end when Anthony Blinken and Binyamin Netanyahu have no retort to the charge besides “name calling,” which my students will tell you sits at the bottom of the hierarchy of disagreement.
Rhetoric finds its end when a student raises her hand and asks me what you’re supposed to do when people with all the education in the world still don’t see why they are wrong. I reply that if a person can’t be reasoned with, they are probably indifferent to whether or not you see things their way, and they just want you to shut up. A student comes to my class after a protest of a speech from an IDF soldier, a couple weeks after a controversial pro-Palestine speech at the same venue. I pose the Socratic question of why we should protest one but not the other, and he answers flippantly “one of them doesn’t kill children.” I raise my eyebrows amusedly and make a hand motion he knows to be a call to continue his argument and provide evidence and reasoning. He tries again: “The speakers they have at the venue represent the venue’s values, it’s wrong to give a platform to a soldier from an army that’s doing genocide, and it sends the message that those actions are legitimate. We shouldn’t act like it’s ok for them to just come here and say what they want to say, it makes the whole thing look normal when it isn’t.”
The end of rhetoric isn’t even when we don’t care what the other thinks of our argument. The end of rhetoric is, in fact, when we don’t think the other is capable of understanding the truth of our argument. The end of rhetoric is the wall, razor wire, checkpoints, partitions, human made lines which divide and disfigure the world. Earlier, we explored the rhetoricity of the charge of genocide. Viewed from this perspective, a charge of genocide is an epideictic argument which claims that the perpetrating society is guilty of treating a group of people as incapable of understanding their values or inhabiting their value universe. A lot of times the justification of this pattern of treatment involves a series of explanations as to why “we” can’t live with “them.”
Evidence presented is often manifold but almost always involves the claim that “nobody else wants to live with them either,” which is regularly said about Palestinians. Cultural backwardness, irrationality, intellectual deficiency, and so on are attributed to Palestinians not only by far-right Israeli politicians, which would be bad enough, but also by wide swaths of United States civil society. A lot of people with some level of education are able to disguise these indictments of Palestinian life in rationalizations and allusions, but if you pay attention you can usually make it out. This too, is the end of rhetoric. The idea that a person or entire group of people lives their lives in a fundamentally anti-rhetorical way and has no value universe to speak of at all. In the case of Palestinians, this charge often takes the form of a full-scale denial of the existence of Palestinians as a coherent national group or identity, a denial which is chillingly commonplace in United States civil society. This, too is rhetorical, and epideictic as well. The denial of a Palestinian identity based in anything other than an antagonism to Israel renders the Palestinian cause fundamentally illegitimate, and anti-rhetorical. With no solid position or truth content to speak of, any claim to Palestinian freedom or equality in historic Palestine can only be a “bastard discourse,” a pathological utterance threatening reason and civility. Thus, if Palestine is erased, rhetoric as we have understood it can be preserved, and everything can go on as normal.
If the denial of Palestinian life, and Palestine itself, is successfully performed within a given discussion, then the unprecedented global solidarity movement that has erupted since October is simply evidence of a pathology within late modernity, as I’ve seen argued. Younger generations, and pathologized adults like me, are simply suffering through various social ills and looking for a scapegoat in the State of Israel. Viewed from this position, we have still reached the end of rhetoric. Millions of people around the world, thousands of civil society organizations, the world’s highest political bodies, have all, in this view, embraced a fundamentally anti-rhetorical position, one with no truth value. Not only is this the logical conclusion when Palestine is erased, this conclusion fundamentally depends on the erasure of Palestine. Thus, to see the end of rhetoric in a keffiyeh or a Palestinian flag is fundamentally to accept the erasure of Palestine and the abrogation of any notion of hereness, any idea that humans can live together without walls, checkpoints, varying degrees of social belonging, partitions, razor wire, gun towers, Bantustans, ghettos, prisons, and lines which divide the world. Thus, the promise of a Free Palestine is the dream of rhetoric itself. To affirm Palestinian life and mourn the murder of Gaza, as painful as it is, is to hold fast to the promise of rhetoric, to choose to believe that it does not have to be so. As I said, we failed. Palestine will be free in our lifetime regardless of what we do. Whether we choose to find rhetoric’s promise at the end of rhetoric is up to us.
Walter Lucken IV is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York. He studies public rhetorics of state violence, incarceration, and higher education. His previous writing has appeared in ROAR, Michigan Quarterly Review, Community Literacy Journal, and Art & The Public Sphere.
