Stormer Paper

An Appetite for Rhetoric

"But experience teaches us with abundant examples that nothing is less within men's [sic] power than to hold their tongues or control their appetites" (Spinoza 106).  Speech is effectively appetite for Spinoza and the appetites operate through affectivity.  Its important to note that an appetite for speech works with and against hunger, the master figure for appetite. The relevance of this insight to rhetorical theory might begin with the unmarked satiety of the rhetor's body: it is typically assumed to be a well fed body, or at least not a starving one. What difference could the material relation of humans to food have for rhetorical theory?

Ischomachus tells Socrates "no man [sic] ever yet persuaded himself that he could live without the staff of life" in Xenophon's Economist (loc. 1555).  So speech is not more powerful than food, and the lack of food is therefore destructive of the polis. I take this as a premise and, seeking its limit, see what is salvageable if its invalidated.  Echoing Ischomachus, farmers have been repeatedly valorized as the bringers of civilization; cultivators before culture.  Jefferson wrote to Washington that farmers were God's chosen people, since in addition to minimizing war, "husbandry begets permanent improvement, quiet life and orderly conduct, both public and private."  Emerson wrote that farming "stands nearest to God, the first cause" in that all that is good in society follows from it. I am not interested in moral improvement of the subject or wealth creation, however, but something more basic. I am interested in the farmer as pleating two appetites, hunger and speech, and where rhetoric falls relative to the fold (Deleuze).

Norman Borlaug, the great advocate of the Green Revolution, said in his Landon Lecture at Kansas State, "Food is the first basic necessity . . . When stomachs go empty, patience wears out and anger flares. If we're going to achieve world stability, it won't be done, I assure you, on

empty stomachs" (3). The first first of farming, before virtue and wealth, is food. In Spinozist terms, hunger is not affect but an affective multiplier that takes over the desire to persist in being (conatus).  Hunger unleashes a terrible vitality that seeks only its cessation; an unmet need to eat amplifies anger, leading to violence as the only possible modality or style of being.  Hunger heightens our material vulnerability to the world, including ourselves, in very narrow ways, that at the same time makes us less vulnerable to the well-heeled habits of human communication.

Starvation is a wordless rhetoric of appetite that supersedes others, an incredible motive force whose danger lies in that it undoes other strains of rhetoric that may forestall violence.

Elaine Scarry's discussion of pain resonates with me here. The hungry body, like the body in pain, becomes monadic in a particular way, folding everything in on itself and out from itself relative to the process of starvation.  Or, to the extent that rhetoric is understood as creative forces mobilized to affect, hunger is "the wild" at the heart of civility (Bennett 19), a gaunt power that both obliterates and compels other forms invention.  One might say it is necropolitical, but that is too much.  Hunger is an orientation to death, but it is not an appetite for death; it is an appetite for sustenance turned desperate.

Accordingly, in a Physiocratic rendering of the pharmakon, Francois Quesnay argued in "Natural Right," "the physical causes of physical evil are themselves the causes of physical good" (47).  Quesnay was discussing food, but the thing food addresses, hunger, is no less a pharmakon.  Hunger causes war and violence but as an appetite that we wish to prevent, it gives other appetites like speech purpose.  In the physiocrats, Jefferson, Emerson, and Borlaug, providing enough food precedes politics and economics and at the same time is the principal focus of governance, or rather hunger seems to be a radical, immanent political economy of need

that engenders civil society and which must always be tended to lest a society collapse (this also is in line with Malthusianism, and Borlaug is most certainly a neo-Malthusian).  In which case, farming becomes an inventive tekne that is at once separated from traditional linguistic strains of rhetorical practice but that invents them all the same. The appetite for speech, here broadly referencing signification, is capacitated through its fold specific to hunger.

If hunger is a pharmakon of rhetoric, a silent discourse of appetite that destroys or empowers other rhetorics as it enfolds them, then the farmer is a mediator of material ecologies for rhetoric.  Farming is an inflection point where preventive action on hunger turns toward and against the need to eat, becoming generative beyond itself as physical evil produces physical good. Agri- and aquaculture extend soil, minerals, water, plants, animals, and humans into one another in ways that increase affective power of other appetites, including "speech." As Borlaug, Jefferson, Emerson, Quesnay, and indeed Malthus assumed in some measure, when the appetite for speech is sated with the extension and improvement of agriculture, the whole of human societies are extended and improved. The farmer is a key adaptation of the will to matter and, thus, rhetoric. To paraphrase Bruno Latour, 'not all things in Rhetoric are Rhetorical.'

All this is an oblique statement that the condition for rhetoric, via conatus, is survival as opposed to creativity.  Or, rather, creativity is subordinate to and lacks purpose unless it is furthers survival, which is problematic to say the least. This is implicit in Xeonophon's Economist, made explicit in Ischumachus's assertion, and its not the first time someone has posited such an idea either (see Nietzsche's "Truth and Lies"). So here is the breakpoint.

Appetite as generative of rhetoric is not simply about a biopolitics of survival, which means the purpose of rhetoric in human community is not only the unfolding of survival. As

Elizabeth Grosz explains in her recent book Becoming Undone, conatus is about art as well. Discussing the value of Darwin for philosophy, she argues that sex selection in evolutionary theory is regularly lost in the processes of natural selection. Yet the creative forces unleashed by flowers to attract bees, for example, are in excess of reproductive utility. Sex selection, she argues, "expands the world of the living into the nonfunctional, the redundant, the artistic.  It enables matter to become more than it is, it enables the body to extend itself" (loc. 1706). Art is the "eruption of taste" within conatus and is not reducible to survival (loc. 1689).  Michael Pollan elaborates this point indirectly in Botany of Desire, tracing how apples, tulips, cannabis, and potatoes co-evolved with humans.  Food is infinitely more than sustenance and humans adapt and develop with plants and animals in complicated relations of taste, not just of practicality.

Rhetoric in a political economics like Xenophon's is affective cultivation subservient to survival; excess comes in the form of virtue and wealth from meeting basic needs well. Yet food production is one of the great pillars of creative, non-rational achievement, too (and then what of cookery, an inartful practice for Plato?). The farmer's relation to rhetoric is as a site of material creativity where multiple modes of becoming (that is multiple addressivities toward the world), adapt and create new modes of being.  Speech and hunger adapt to each other, with rhetoric materially agnostic on its proper home in either of them.  Instead, rhetoric is about creative adaptation addressed, the artfulness of becoming, which may serve survival, but maybe not.

Rhetoric's relation to persistence in being is not determined by hunger, but it does create with it and cannot finally be severed from it. The farmer, like the conceit of the legislator or lawyer or cleric, turns out to be critical for thinking about rhetoric's potential: being "of the world" we must eat  -- so that we may be "for the world" we must create (Deleuze 26).

Works Cited

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