Orator Communist

Since it is the presumption of many that debate requires a common ground for argumentation to proceed, I want to begin by highlighting the points of agreement between myself and my comrades. To wit: "The working class has not left the stage of world history." I would add that a host of other social subjects around the world, speaking through rhetorics of socialism, feminism, environmentalism, the Enlightenment, racial justice, and/or counterglobalization, are also struggling to remake the world. However, I fear that Cloud, Macek, and Aune's critical approach imagines the rhetoric of these struggles as reactive, as simply responding, in positive or negative ways, to a rhetorical situation of domination and exploitation. To assign these struggles a reactive position is to limit our understanding of these struggles to the success or failure of strategic actors. In the case of the "working class" such an "instrumentalist" approach turns class into a thing and not a political composition; it is to assume that class is "ordained by or founded on positions in a larger social structure or as constituting social groups (classes) unified by commonalities of power, property, consciousness, etc." (Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wolff 2000, 9). For a materialist rhetoric, however, class should be approached as a process, not a product. To do otherwise is to approach class, or, more specifically, the working class, as an identity removed from social history and capitalist social relations. To do otherwise is to risk limiting the political imagination of Marxism to a "red wage slavery" (Thoburn 2002, 449) where surplus value is appropriated and enforced by the state.

Just as one must approach class from the standpoint of the history of capitalist social relations, one must begin to view rhetorical communication from a similar vantage point. My essay "Rhetoric and Capitalism" (hereafter R&C) does just that (Greene 2004). It orients my earlier work on the rhetorical technologies of governmentality (Greene 1998) more squarely within the changing modes of capitalist production. In R&C, I develop Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's (2000, 2004) proposition that capitalist production is not only extending its global reach, but is intensive, that is, tending toward the biopolitical. Taking Hardt and Negri's perspective allows rhetorical studies to account for how capitalism continues to capture and colonize, as its very own, the stuff of rhetoric, what Cicero once termed "human life and conduct;" a substance increasingly restricted to what Agamben calls bare life and its forms (politics).¹ In a world where money and speech are fused, we can no longer pretend that rhetorical agency exists outside the domain of capitalist command. The civic idealism that underwrites rhetorical agency as political participation is more than complicit in capitalism; it is becoming capitalism's alibi. All the while we imagine democracy consisting of free speech, capitalism turns speech into money and money into speech, and the proliferation of speech becomes proof of the democratic character of capitalism. This is the character of the rhetorical situation today; a situation reproduced every time the U.S. Supreme Court rules political expenditures to be speech. In this context, we need to find concepts to describe and evaluate the appearance and command of "money/speech" so the rhetorical tradition might remain responsive to the world of which it is a part. To accomplish such a renewal, I am arguing that rhetorical studies should be less committed to fashioning the modern day orator-statesman [sic]—the deliberative citizen. Instead, rhetorical theory should be working toward the exodus of orator-communists.² The exodus of the orator-communist consists of a generalized refusal or defection from the commands of money/speech. Through exodus, the ontological power of the orator-communist assembles the "constituent republic" of the multitude.³

Cloud, Macek, and Aune understand the productive "limits of communication" to be guaranteed by the "reality" of the world. This is not a point of disagreement; reality disrupts the most ambitious, incompetent, and/or humble of plans. However...