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319 An Inflammatory Fag and a Queer Form: Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency Erin J. Rand Rhetorical agency is the capacity for words and actions to be intelligible and forceful, and to create effects through their formal and stylistic conventions. The polemical discourses of Larry Kramer, a controversial AIDS activist, demonstrate a concurrence of features that define the polemic as a rhetorical form and therefore enable agency: alienating expressions of emotion; non-contingent assertions of truth; presumptions of shared morality; and the constitution of enemies, audiences, and publics. The unexpected uptake of Kramer’s texts by academics invites consideration of the polemic as a queer form that resists the assumption of a necessary and predictable relationship between an intending agent and an action’s effects. Thus, the polemic highlights the riskiness, unpredictability, and inevitable contingency of agency, and positions queerness itself as the condition of possibility for any rhetorical act. Keywords: Rhetorical Agency; Form; Polemics; Larry Kramer; Queer The staggering loss of lives during the early years of the AIDS crisis was only one of the consequences of the epidemic in the United States; those perceived to be homosexual also experienced levels of homophobia, violence, and discrimination that increased drastically as fear of the virus intensified. Reacting to these oppressive and frightening conditions, many lesbian and gay activists began demonstrating and speaking out with a new anger, militancy, and visibility. Indeed, with the formation of Erin J. Rand is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Vanderbilt University. This essay is derived from a chapter of the author’s dissertation, directed by Barbara A. Biesecker and defended at the University of Iowa in 2006. The author wishes to thank Barbara A. Biesecker, Charles E. Morris III, David Hingstman, Leslie Hahner, Stephen Hartnett, and G. Mitchell Reyes, as well as Editors David Henry and John Louis Lucaites, and four anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions throughout the development of this essay. The author also appreciates the financial support of the Department of Communication Studies and the student government of the University of Iowa. Correspondence to: Department of Communication Studies, Vanderbilt University, VU Station B #351505, 2301 Vanderbilt Place, Nashville, TN, 37235-1505. Email: erin.j.rand@vanderbilt.edu. ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) # 2008 National Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/00335630802210377 298 E. J. Rand activist groups such as the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Sex Panic!, Queer Nation, the Pink Panthers, the Lesbian Avengers, and many more, the face of lesbian and gay activism underwent a significant shift in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This activism was intended not merely to promote acceptance or tolerance, but also to reclaim loudly and forcefully the rights to safety and humanity, and to forge identity and end victimization through self-defense.1 Larry Kramer has been one of the most influential activists in the gay community since the beginning of the AIDS crisis, but he also has been an extremely harsh critic of his fellow gay men. He played a pivotal role in the founding of GMHC and ACT UP, but his scathing criticisms of gay male sexual behavior and of the gay community’s activist practices have provoked the ire of gay activists and academics alike. While other AIDS activists were attempting to counter the common sentiment that gay men were to blame for the AIDS virus, Kramer adamantly indicted the gay community for what he perceived to be its failure to give up potentially risky sexual practices and to take action on its own behalf. As a prolific speech-maker and editorialist, Kramer’s messages were generally loud and emotional, making liberal use of boldface type, capital letters, and multiple exclamation points. His propensity to be shrill and nearly hysterical in both speech and print has led to his reputation as an angry prophet, a moralist, and a polemicist. But it is not merely due to his caustic style and personality or to the inflammatory nature of his words that Kramer has come to occupy such a central (if contentious) position among AIDS activists, within the queer community, and in queer theoretical work. Rather, this is also a result of the polemical form in which his invectives so often are delivered. That the effects of Kramer’s words emerge across a range of different sites (academia and activist practices) highlights the extent to which polemics are apt to be put to unexpected uses and to have unpredictable effects. Instead of viewing the unpredictability of the polemical form as a limitation to its usefulness, I understand it as the source of the polemic’s productive possibilities to create change. That is, the irreducible distance between the polemic and its uptake* or the polemicist’s inability to control the uptake of the polemic*is precisely the necessary condition for the enactment of agency. This is not to say that the substance of a polemic is necessarily, or even usually, resistant or progressive, but that the form itself enables rhetorical acts that do not merely repeat the status quo. As a rhetorical form that reveals the general economy of undecidability from which agency emerges, then, the polemic is productively excessive and provocatively queer. By casting the polemic as a queer rhetorical form, I do not mean to suggest that it is a form essentially suited to queers, that it marks gendered or sexual difference, or that it promotes resistance or opposition. Instead, I am claiming as queerness the lack of a necessary or predictable relation between an intending agent and the effects of an action. I am thus working against the prevailing academic and popular trends to employ ‘‘queer’’ either as an umbrella term for ‘‘gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered’’ identities, or as a label for sexualities and politics that disrupt the hetero/homo binary.2 In other words, this is a de-essentialized notion of queerness Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency 299 that disconnects ‘‘queer’’ from any particular referent, and instead refigures it as the undecidability from which rhetorical agency is actualized. The question of rhetorical agency has, in fact, been a topic of recent interest to rhetorical scholars, but the specific relationship between rhetorical agency and rhetorical form has been less thoroughly explored.3 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell has long discussed the formal and generic dimensions of rhetorical agency, and identifies the ‘‘power of form’’ as one of the features central to an audience’s ability to take up, categorize, and understand any symbolic act.4 Campbell explains, ‘‘Form is the foundation of all communication, but it is also a type of agency that has a power to separate a text from its nominal author and from its originary moment of performance.’’5 I certainly follow Campbell’s lead in attending to the power of form, but her definition of rhetorical agency*‘‘the capacity to act, that is, to have the competence to speak or write in a way that will be recognized or heeded by others in one’s community’’*demonstrates a common impasse in rhetorical scholars’ attempts to account for the relationship between form and agency.6 Namely, even as this definition highlights the form of a text, it remains rooted in the agency of an individual rhetor. To be sure, Campbell clearly intends to move away from a rhetorcentered notion of agency, arguing, ‘‘agency is textual or, put differently, texts have agency,’’ but her initial provocative claim that ‘‘agency is textual’’ is undermined by her apparent restatement that ‘‘texts have agency.’’7 The textuality of agency refers not to the location or possession of agency, but to the fact that agency can be exercised only through available and socially recognizable forms of discourse. Thus, agency’s ‘‘text’’ is more properly understood in terms of Jacques Derrida’s texte*the weave of language through which we can have knowledge of the world and actions can come to make sense.8 Although particular forms of speech and writing enable agency by allowing for specific kinds of uptake, neither texts nor rhetors ‘‘have’’ agency separate from their contextual articulations. This conflation of the textuality of agency and the agency of texts, as well as the assumption of a humanistic subject, are also reflected in Darrel Enck-Wanzer’s argument about the transformational capabilities of ‘‘intersectional rhetoric.’’ On one hand, he claims, ‘‘diverse forms intersect organically to create something challenging to rhetorical norms,’’ suggesting that it is the forms themselves that are capable of action; on the other hand, he grants the actor the ability to utilize, hybridize, or reject particular rhetorical forms in the service of structures of power, while failing to indicate that it is only through rhetorical form that this capacity for action is produced.9 Thus, both Campbell’s and Enck-Wanzer’s arguments exemplify a common tension in rhetorical scholars’ treatments of the agency of rhetorical form: even as they highlight the importance of form, they continue to assume that agency belongs either to the rhetor or to the text. The reformulation of rhetorical agency that I advance through a formal reading of Kramer’s polemics attempts to move through this tension by suggesting that the formal features of texts enable agency. In contrast to an understanding of rhetorical agency as the ability of rhetors or texts to act, I view rhetorical agency as the capacity for words and/or actions to come to make sense and therefore to create effects 300 E. J. Rand through their particular formal and stylistic conventions. These conventions are, I contend, specific materializations of institutional power. Texts are intelligible to the extent that they can be identified formally (as polemics or academic essays, for example), and the regulation of the standards of form is one of the ways that power is exercised through social institutions (such as the academy). The textual conventions of institutions are therefore both productive (they enable the force of a text) and constraining (they determine the limits of intelligibility). Rhetorical forms, in other words, operate much like subject positions: they are sites within institutional matrices of power through which discourse becomes intelligible.10 In what follows I begin by briefly describing and contextualizing Kramer’s performances of verbal and textual invective in the 1980s and early 1990s. First, by focusing on a number of excerpts from Kramer’s polemics, I draw out an extensive formal theory of polemics. Next, I contend that the polemic is a queer form that has important implications for an understanding and theorization of rhetorical agency that highlights the risks and undecidability of acting. Ultimately, Kramer’s polemics serve as an especially provocative site from which to theorize rhetorical agency in a manner that considers queerness as its condition of possibility and that emphasizes formal and stylistic conventions as materializations of power through which discourse is intelligible. Larry Kramer, Angry AIDS Activist Although Kramer has been relentless in lamenting the divisiveness, in-fighting, and uncooperativeness that he feels the gay community has displayed in the face of an extended and deadly crisis, he nonetheless has spurred the formation of ACT UP, arguably the largest and most effective activist organization devoted to HIV/AIDS.11 ACT UP has been called ‘‘the most significant direct-action campaign in the United States since the anti-Vietnam war movement in the 1960s’’ and ‘‘perhaps the most innovative protest movement ever,’’ and has been listed among the top ten most influential social justice organizations in the past three decades.12 In addition to being aligned with activism, Kramer is also commonly associated with the rise of gay conservatism in the early 1990s. Represented by writers and journalists such as Andrew Sullivan, Randy Shilts, Michelangelo Signorile, Gabriel Rotello, and Bruce Bawer, these ‘‘gaycons’’ held conservative views that differed dramatically from the radical activist practices that attempted to resignify the ‘‘queer’’ label and expose the heteronormative underpinnings of the social order.13 I concentrate only on Kramer in this essay, neither to treat him as a representative of a shared ‘‘gaycon’’ perspective nor to make generalizations about the use of the polemic by other ‘‘gaycon’’ writers. Rather, I focus on Kramer precisely because his position among the ‘‘gaycons’’ straddles uneasily the roles of activist, journalist, community spokesperson, and rabble-rouser; hence, the tendency for polemics to create unintended effects is amplified by the array of audiences to which Kramer’s words are addressed. Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency 301 Although Kramer’s perspectives on homosexuality, HIV and AIDS, and gay male sexual behavior remained contentious within both queer and mainstream discourses, they enjoyed relatively widespread circulation. He has written a number of novels and plays, including The Normal Heart (1985), the best-selling gay novel Faggots (1978), and the screenplay for D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1969). Published often in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, Kramer also has been invited to speak at numerous public events since the early 1980s.14 He appeared on the cover of the Advocate in 1992 and was featured on the cover of Newsweek in 2001, where his AIDS activism over the years was chronicled in the magazine’s special report on ‘‘AIDS at 20.’’ However, while many authors within both the academy and the mainstream press have engaged the logic of Kramer’s arguments, their moral or psychological implications, and their repercussions for queer politics, little attention has been paid to the form in which his words are habitually delivered. Theorizing the Polemic Attempting to understand the polemic as a rhetorical form presents an immediate problem: the most basic and common definitions of ‘‘polemic’’ describe only the content of a text. For instance, polemics are often understood to be nearly synonymous with controversy; as one of the OED’s primary definitions explains, a polemic is ‘‘a controversial argument or discussion’’ or an ‘‘aggressive controversy.’’ This definition does little to identify what is unique about the polemic as a rhetorical form, and it does not address the way in which the polemic functions within a controversy. Furthermore, the derision with which polemics are generally regarded* whether because they appear to intentionally and flagrantly disregard reason or because they rely on persuasion at the expense of verifiable evidence*cannot be accounted for by a definition that considers polemics only in terms of controversy. After all, ‘‘polemic’’ is an adaptation of the Greek polemikos, which means ‘‘warlike.’’ Although ‘‘warlike’’ and ‘‘controversial’’ are certainly related, wars are unique in that they begin precisely when more reasoned, thoughtful means of argumentation or persuasion have been exhausted. Wars, like polemics, are neither fine-tuned instruments for working through the issues at hand nor meant to advance nuanced, rational arguments; instead, they are an attempt to reach resolution through forceful or violent means when more civil and peaceful methods have proven unsuccessful. Ultimately, when ‘‘the polemical’’ is reduced to ‘‘the controversial,’’ the features that distinguish polemics from controversies*and the elements of polemics that earn them disfavor*are erased. After all, while all polemics may be controversial, not all controversies are polemical. Therefore, rather than understanding the polemic in terms of the controversial, I consider it instead as a rhetorical move that sometimes occurs within a given controversy. Using Kramer’s texts as a guide and a resource, I identify four specific rhetorical features that are unique to the polemical form: alienating expressions of emotion, non-contingent assertions of truth, presumptions of shared morality, and the constitution of enemies, audiences, and publics. None of 302 E. J. Rand these individual features belongs exclusively to the polemic; rather, it is through their concurrence that they give shape to the polemic as a recognizable rhetorical form. Alienating Expressions of Emotion One of the most overt and frequently remarked aspects of Kramer’s spoken and written discourse is his intense and undisguised anger. For instance, in the conclusion to a flyer he distributed to all the guests at a dinner honoring President Bill Clinton’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Kramer writes, This new president made us promises and has done nothing to implement these promises or to even discuss with us the possibilities of implementing these promises. We have been completely shut out from any discussions which is bad enough until you realize there aren’t even any discussions going on! Why do people never believe me until it’s too late?! We are being intentionally allowed to die!15 In addition to the underscoring that Kramer uses to emphasize certain portions of his text, the font grows progressively bigger toward the bottom of the flyer, until the final sentence*in large boldface type with a double underline*leaps off the page with furious vehemence. The anger that is textually depicted in this flyer mimics Kramer’s usual manner of delivering speeches or writing essays: he commonly builds to a crescendo of rage and indignation that is accompanied by shouting or multiple exclamation points. His reputation for delivering shrill invectives has led the Advocate to describe him on its cover as ‘‘America’s angriest AIDS activist,’’ and Newsweek, which calls him an ‘‘angry prophet,’’ to suggest that when he dies it will be ‘‘furiously and uncooperatively.’’16 But this quality is not unique to Kramer; the salience of anger is often noted as a primary component of polemics in general. Kathryn Thomas Flannery, for instance, considers polemics as a textual performance of rage, while Jonathan Crewe explains the academic denial of polemics in terms of their violence, belligerence, and aggression.17 Of course, emotional appeals are used liberally in many forms of public address to persuade or motivate an audience. What is unique about the emotion that operates in polemics is that it does not function as an appeal made through pathos; instead, the emotion is performed formally through the text’s structural elements. That is, Kramer’s angry speeches do not attempt to elicit anger from the audience, unite the audience through their shared sense of anger, or move them to action based on emotion; rather, Kramer performs his own anger at what he perceives to be the audience’s failure to behave in the way that he desires, and his performance adheres to a consistent formal pattern in which a series of factual statements rapidly swell to a climactic display of fury and frustration. Sometimes these overflowing formal expressions of anger seem to work against the apparent goals of his texts, since members of the audience may react negatively to his accusations. The use of emotion in Kramer’s polemics, then, does not function rhetorically in a traditional manner: not only does it violate expectations about decorum in public speaking, but also the Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency 303 sometimes shocking formal performance of anger is just as likely to alienate*rather than satisfy or motivate*the audience. Non-Contingent Assertions of Truth Though they may be off-putting or even offensive to his audience, Kramer always presents his expressions of emotion as a natural and legitimate reaction to a truth* or to the violation of a truth*which is, for him, self-evident. For instance, he consistently demonstrates his impatience with gay men who are not helping to fight the battle against AIDS. Part of this struggle, he contends in his essay ‘‘1,112 and Counting,’’ involves coming out: ‘‘I am sick of closeted gays . . . There is only one thing that’s going to save some of us, and this is numbers and pressure and our being perceived as united and a threat . . . Unless we can generate, visibly, numbers, masses, we are going to die.’’18 In this passage Kramer does not attempt to address the various reasons for which individuals may be unable to come out or may choose not to do so; nor does he offer evidence that coming out in large numbers is necessarily linked to empowerment or to increased AIDS research and better medical care. Instead, Kramer merely asserts unequivocally that coming out is absolutely necessary to fighting AIDS, and that remaining closeted effectively kills oneself and one’s community. When he states that ‘‘we are going to die,’’ he may*as he is sometimes accused*be hysterical, extremist, or apocalyptic; more importantly, however, he is forwarding what is, for him, the truth about the situation in which he finds himself. Thus, Kramer’s passionate conviction in a particular version of the truth, even when that truth may not be evident to others, is another characteristic of his polemical form. Polemics forgo the expected methodical construction of an argument through the presentation of evidence and logic in favor of a simple declaration or indictment. The tendency to assert a truth that is not contingent on context, consensus, or logical proof appears so contradictory to ‘‘the inevitable provisionality of a rhetorical gesture’’ that some have described it as ‘‘antirhetorical directness.’’19 Kenneth J. E. Graham, for instance, explains that the rhetorical is marked by dialogue and debate, involves arguing on both sides of an issue, and is necessarily social in outlook.20 The antirhetorical, on the other hand, refuses rhetoric’s tentativeness and need for consensus, involves a non-rhetorical way of knowing and being, and makes ‘‘a certain kind of claim to truth*a claim animated by an insistent demand for certainty.’’21 Graham thus narrows the realm of rhetoric to include only cooperative, dialogic, and decorous speech. Utterances that are indecorous or antagonistic, such as Kramer’s contention that gay men who refuse to come out are hastening the deaths of their own community members, are not oriented toward the social and therefore are not rhetorical. Graham’s notion of the ‘‘antirhetorical’’ is useful in identifying one of the peculiar features of polemics, then, but ultimately it disavows the way in which the form does, in fact, function rhetorically. Rather than excluding Kramer’s noncontingent proclamations from the realm of rhetoric, I claim them as a specific rhetorical feature of the polemical form. In other words, when Kramer violates the 304 E. J. Rand norms of rhetoric that Graham asserts, his tactics cannot simply be excluded as antirhetorical; rather, these ‘‘violations’’ are one of the features that define the polemic as a unique rhetorical form. Furthermore, Kramer’s declarations of truth do not merely argue on behalf of an already existent perspective within the current controversy, but they forward a truth that is highly personal. For instance, after repeatedly and forcefully proclaiming that ‘‘AIDS is intentional genocide,’’ Kramer’s next words pour out in a rush of conviction: AIDS is intentional genocide and I know with all my heart and soul that it is intentional and I am going to say it over and over and over until I die and I may go to my death with all of you thinking I am crazy but I am going to go to my death knowing that I spoke the truth and I spoke it every single day of this plague and I spoke it over and over and over again.22 Accenting the ‘‘intensely personal’’ is a crucial component of Kramer’s discourse, emphasizing his emotional investment in his positions and portraying disagreements as personal affronts.23 Because they advocate personal realities, polemics may make intelligible those ‘‘partial’’ versions of the truth that cannot usually be heard in a public sphere based on the assumptions of shared experiences and a common worldview. Polemics thus abstain from expressing a supposedly universal perspective, and instead emphatically endorse the particular. The unabashedly particular can be crystallized because polemics do not face the burden of establishing a common ground as a precondition for their logical appeals. Again, it is not just that the specific truth championed by a given polemic challenges the status quo, but also that it is invoked through rapid repetition*literally hammered home with a series of bold and escalating assertions* rather than through rational means of argumentation. Presumptions of Shared Morality Since Kramer often presents his version of the truth as a foregone conclusion and without offering supporting evidence, his texts tend to take on a discomfortingly moralistic or self-righteous tone. Rather than moving his audience through a series of logical steps to forward his argument, Kramer describes his polemical truth as a moral*rather than rational*choice. The audience is therefore not so much persuaded as they are expected or morally obliged to believe. Consider Kramer’s speech at the memorial service for his friend and fellow activist, Vito Russo.24 Instead of delivering the expected eulogy, Kramer launched his usual critique of the perceived inactivity of the gay community in the fight against HIV and AIDS, this time with Russo’s death offered as proof of this apathy. ‘‘We killed Vito,’’ Kramer proclaims, ‘‘[a]s sure as any virus killed him, we killed him. Everyone in this room killed him . . . Vito was killed by 25 million gay men and lesbians who for ten long years of this plague have refused to get our act together.’’25 Kramer does not deny the homophobia and outright hostility of medical and government institutions in dealing with AIDS; however, he ultimately refuses to allow the blame for the AIDS epidemic Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency 305 to rest on their shoulders. When medical researchers, hospitals, and insurance agencies treat people with AIDS unfairly, Kramer says, ‘‘we let them shit all over us. We let them kill us, too. We’re very generous.’’26 Regardless of the larger forces that may have played a role in Russo’s death, then, Kramer repeatedly returns to his bottom line: Russo died because ‘‘we didn’t fight hard enough to save him.’’27 In other words, the polemic that Kramer delivers in place of a eulogy resembles a sermon or a moral reprimand. Speaking as a moral leader whose stance need not be substantiated, Kramer preaches a moral truth and warns of the consequences if its integrity is not guarded. Advocating personal responsibility in the face of AIDS as a moral issue, Kramer admonishes that it is immoral to stand idly by while members of one’s own community are dying. Hence, polemics refute dominant ideologies and modes of thinking by rejecting the primacy of reason and invoking explicitly moral claims. In polemics a moral position is not simply advanced through rhetoric, but morality actually does rhetorical work. When Kramer tells his audience that their inaction led to Vito Russo’s death, then, his goal is not to encourage them to embrace a particular moral stance. Rather, his argument for the necessity of mobilization and activism is made explicitly on the basis of and through a presumed morality. It is precisely this rootedness in morality that motivates some authors’ objections to polemics. For instance, Michel Foucault is sharply critical of the polemical form and claims he refuses to engage in it because of what he views as the morality involved in particular modes of knowing: ‘‘a whole morality is at stake, the morality that concerns the search for the truth and the relation to the other.’’28 While Foucault is wary of polemics because of the ways in which they bring together morality and truth, Kramer seems happy to acknowledge the extent to which he views his own moral position as coterminous with the truth. Rather than denying the moral underpinnings of his polemics against the sexual promiscuity of the gay community, for example, he encourages those who would see him as a ‘‘moralist.’’ He prefers this role, he explains, to that of an activist: ‘‘I’ve always slightly bristled when I’m described as an ‘activist.’ It’s a word I’m uncomfortable with.’’29 On the other hand, he notes, ‘‘I’ve also been accused of being a ‘moralist’*my accusers not realizing that nothing they could say would please me more.’’30 Indeed, Kramer’s religious, moralistic tone is not lost on his readers and reviewers, who tend to describe him as ‘‘evangelical’’ or as a ‘‘prophet.’’31 For Kramer, being an activist is associated with being ‘‘radical’’; as a moralist, however, he is being ‘‘eminently sensible,’’ or merely telling the truth.32 Constitution of Enemies, Audiences, and Publics Thus far I have described the rhetorical features of the polemic only in terms of the author’s contributions to the form, but the most intriguing and important characteristic of the polemic is the way in which it constitutes enemies, audiences, and publics. In keeping with his emphasis on truth and morality, Kramer does not present a set of objective facts for his audience to review; on the contrary, at every 306 E. J. Rand moment he attempts to dissolve the distance between the audience and the text by implicating the audience as the cause of the problem, the means for a solution, and the community that is affected by both. One way in which he promotes this complicity is through the use of questions that explicitly or implicitly position the audience as already part of a defined group. For instance, when Kramer asks, ‘‘Do you, as a member of a community of liberal and caring and thinking people, accept that a plague can be going on and you are doing nothing to stop it?’’ he both constructs his audience as ‘‘liberal, caring, thinking people’’ and defines the actions that are expected of such a group.33 The audience does not merely receive or attend to Kramer’s words; rather, the text cultivates the partisanship of the audience, and the audience’s participation*whether as skeptics or believers*inflects the polemical form of the text. Both John Angus Campbell and Flannery note the ways in which polemical texts force their readers out of the role of passive, nonaligned recipients of information, and into more active, participatory positions. For example, Campbell describes how Darwin’s dialectical rhythm in On the Origin of Species makes readers feel as if they are involved in compiling the evidence and building the logical structure that eventually leads to his conclusions. ‘‘At each step along the way,’’ Campbell explains, ‘‘Darwin tried to turn his readers from spectators into partisans.’’34 Similarly, Flannery contends that polemic adjectivally names a particular kind of orientation or attitude of the reader toward the text. That is, the polemic dissolves the illusion of a reader’s dispassionate, objective stance: ‘‘Polemic forces an awareness of one’s relationship to a text, forces a recognition of how one is positioned by a text, and thus is openly partisan.’’35 In short, polemics function to modify not only individual identities, but also reader/text relationships in such a way that the allegiances of the reader or audience are shaped by the text itself. The effects of the polemic are not limited, however, to individuals’ relationships to the text. As a number of rhetorical scholars have noted, texts not only address particular ‘‘actual’’ audiences, but also constitute imagined groups of people ideologically as those who are addressed or ignored by the text, or even as those who must be complicitous (but silent) with the text.36 Hence, Kramer’s polemics address*and, through this address, constitute*certain imagined audiences among their readers or listeners. Because polemics always function in opposition to another persona, point of view, or ideology, the construction of the audience takes place in conjunction with the construction of an enemy (after all, it is difficult to imagine a polemic that does not rail ‘‘against’’ someone or something). This feature of the polemic is one that Foucault finds especially problematic: in contrast to the partnership that is developed within a dialogue, he contends that the polemicist refuses to question his own position or rights, and that ‘‘the person he confronts is not a partner in the search for the truth, but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful and whose very existence constitutes a threat.’’37 The constitution of an audience and an enemy in Kramer’s texts is further complicated by his propensity for scolding, chastising, and otherwise indicting the very group of people on whose behalf he is ostensibly speaking. For example, Kramer Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency 307 condemns what he sees as gay men’s irresponsible promiscuity, but in so doing he provokes and offends the constituency*other gay men*whose support he is supposedly soliciting. He reprimands them, ‘‘I am sick of guys who moan that giving up careless sex until this blows over is worse than death. How can they value life so little and cocks and asses so much?’’38 Kramer even goes so far as to tell his audience, ‘‘I condemn all of you for your hypocrisy and your silence . . . Yes, I hate all of you for what you don’t do and see.’’39 What is fascinating about polemics, then, is that the enemy and the audience are not only related, but closely aligned, if not barely distinguishable factions of the same groups. Foucault is right in noting that the one addressed by a polemic is constituted as an enemy, but he does not acknowledge that in polemical discourse this enemy is also likely to be, as he puts it, ‘‘a partner in the search for the truth.’’40 Flannery notes that the proximity of the enemy*as it is figured within the polemic*is one of the features unique to this form, and what gives the polemic its characteristic ‘‘heat’’: What readers may notice as the relative emotional intensity of polemic . . . can be tied not simply to the degree of heat fueled by a commitment to a cause but also the relative proximity of opposition. It is one thing to complain about some distant enemy, and another when one shares much in common with the opponent, when the opponent perhaps has been (or may yet be) an ally. The heat seems to come, in other words, in part from the falling away of a friend*or the potential falling away of a friend*as much as the egregious behavior of an alien and unfamiliar Other.41 While the polemicist may share a great deal in common with this immediate or ‘‘proximate’’ enemy, their opposition still takes place in the context of a larger battle. As Flannery points out, second-wave feminists’ polemics often were directed against other women in the movement, but ultimately these polemics also figured a more distant enemy*patriarchy or male chauvinism*against which both groups must be aligned. In other words, polemics construct both a proximate enemy (those against whom the polemic is explicitly directed) and a distant enemy (the larger cultural issues that underlie the immediate opposition). Significantly, the proximate enemy of the polemic is also, at least to some extent, its intended audience. The audience that is constituted by the polemic can never, therefore, be a homogenous group, but is marked by internal contradictions and perhaps outright hostility. In Kramer’s polemics against the sexual practices of the gay male community, then, his criticisms of activists and gay men might be understood to constitute them as not only the proximate opponent but also his primary audience; the distant enemy, on the other hand, is the larger homophobic culture. Kramer is able therefore to chastise gay men for what he views as their irresponsible promiscuity while simultaneously explaining that promiscuity as a result of the sanctions against recognized monogamous homosexual relationships. The anger that is often aroused in those who disagree with Kramer’s perspective*those who refuse to cede gay men’s right to sexual freedom*appears as a consequence of the internecine ‘‘heat’’ to which Flannery refers.42 Ultimately, Flannery contends that the purpose of the polemic is not to resolve potential conflicts, but actually to exploit them. ‘‘[P]olemic hinges on identifying areas of contestation,’’ she explains, but not in order to ‘‘smooth over 308 E. J. Rand those contested areas or to make them go away.’’ Instead, polemic ‘‘seeks to resist closure in order to activate agency among the proximate audience.’’43 Thus, even though Kramer’s polemics may appear to endorse views that are damaging to the queer community, they may nevertheless ‘‘activate agency’’ in those whom they address, enabling not only agreement with, but also vehement opposition to his own polemics as well as those of other conservative gay polemicists. Flannery’s description of polemics offers a provocative reading of their tendency to lash out at those who would be allies as a potentially productive function, but her argument is rooted in a notion of agency that locates the ability to act within individuals, rather than in the institutional forces that make the effects of certain actions intelligible. That is, Flannery understands the agency that arises from polemics to reside in those who hear or read them; the ‘‘contested areas’’ that the polemic highlights provide a space or a motivation for the audience to act. Hence, Flannery’s notion of agency thus fails to account for the ways in which polemics might be used against the grain, or be taken up by other audiences and for other purposes. The rhetorical agency arising from polemics, as well as their construction of audiences and publics, must be conceptualized not through a humanistic understanding of the agency of individuals, but through the force of institutions, where form appears as a particular manifestation of institutional power. That is, the conventions of the polemic, as a recognizable rhetorical form, enable the force and effects of discourse. For example, John H. Smith reads Hegel’s Jena essays*which were written relatively early in his career, prior to the Phenomenology of Spirit*as explicitly polemical.44 Smith suggests that Hegel adopts a rhetorical, polemical stance in order to enter into the ‘‘dialectic of Kritik,’’ or to develop a position from which to make his argument. The goal of Hegel’s polemics, then, was to ‘‘establish an audience that will adopt his assumptions.’’45 It is the establishment of an assenting audience through polemic*not the ability of any individual to act as a result of the polemic* that is important to Hegel. While the polemic certainly functions here to ‘‘activate agency,’’ as Flannery puts it, this is not an agency that is tied to Hegel himself, to Hegel’s texts, or to any particular audience member; rather, it is an institutional agency that effects the production and distribution of particular kinds of ideas. To put this differently, Hegel’s texts constitute a public within which his ideas can circulate. Also attending to the polemic’s activation of institutional agency through the constitution of audiences or publics, Arditi and Valentine argue that polemics produce communities without necessarily reconciling contested issues. They contend that not only are the issues at stake and the identities of those involved shaped by polemics, but also ‘‘the very configuration of the field where their engagement is enacted’’ is effected.46 That is, polemics produce the public space that enables democratic struggles and political disputes. Public space, they explain, ‘‘is what occurs whenever there is contestation. . . . Public space is a space of dispute, but the event of dispute also creates public space and modifies what that space was previously thought to encompass.’’47 Accordingly, the agency that arises from a polemic is not Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency 309 the agency of a particular collection of audience members, but that provided by a public space in which it becomes possible to speak in the name of or make claims on behalf of particular socially recognized groups. It is noteworthy that Arditi and Valentine do not refer here to the ability of polemics to produce ‘‘publics,’’ but rather ‘‘public space.’’ Unlike the kind of publicity that is suggested by Michael Warner, in which publics are constituted specifically through the circulation of texts, here such publicity is spatially based.48 That is, Arditi and Valentine suggest that public space is a site at which issues, individuals, or groups might be developed and debated. The problem with this spatial conceptualization of a public is that it cannot account for the ways in which texts or ideas may also travel temporally. Kramer’s polemics certainly activated agency by opening a conversation in which critical concerns regarding AIDS, homosexuality, and activism could be disputed. However, as the following section will show, they also have unforeseen consequences in terms of their uptake by queer theorists, and these effects emerge at moments that are temporally distant from the delivery or publication of the polemic text itself. As Warner explains, texts ‘‘can be picked up at different times and in different places by otherwise unrelated people,’’ and we must therefore ‘‘imagine a public as an entity that embraces all the users of that text, whoever they might be.’’49 The publics that polemics produce, then, incorporate the unpredictability of the future uses to which the polemic might be put, and accentuate the extent to which the polemic’s author cannot control the circulation or effects of the text. A Queer Form Although the polemic might be identified as a rhetorical form by the concurrence of features that I have described thus far, the effectivity of polemics is never fully determined by these features. By ‘‘effectivity’’ I mean to convey the ways in which any rhetorical action is taken up across a number of different planes of effects. As such, effectivity refers not to the degree to which the effects of a polemic match the polemicist’s intentions, but to the ways in which it is put to use or taken up by others in a variety of different and unforeseen fashions.50 In order to be available for any kind of use, however, a text must appear in a rhetorical form that is recognizable and intelligible to particular audiences in particular situations. Because Kramer’s texts are identified as polemics, it is through this rhetorical form that his discourse comes to make sense and have force.51 According to Kenneth Burke, form produces ‘‘an arousing and fulfilment [sic] of desires,’’ or is the means by which one part of a work ‘‘leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence.’’52 Kramer’s polemics function accordingly: his indictments of his audiences are consistently followed by calls for action and dire warnings about the consequences of disregarding his words. Even if an audience is not particularly pleased by Kramer’s message*if they disagree or are angry with Kramer himself*his polemics are formally, if not substantively, gratifying. 310 E. J. Rand However, Kramer’s speeches and essays gratify the formal expectations that they arouse only within the texts themselves; at the moment that his words enter a wider circulation, they have a disconcerting tendency to spin out of his control, and the possibility for producing other effects is never fully contained. Of course, one cannot regulate or predict the circulation of any text, regardless of form, but the characteristics of polemics make them especially prone to being put to unforeseen uses. The uptake of his texts by scholars in the newly emergent field of queer theory in the early 1990s illustrates this potential for unexpected effects. Douglas Crimp and Lee Edelman, both notable queer theorists, have confronted Kramer’s views in print. Crimp was one of Kramer’s most consistent academic antagonists; he wrote many essays during the 1980s and 1990s criticizing Kramer’s positions, and compiled a number of these essays in his 2002 book, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. In Crimp’s 1987 essay ‘‘How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,’’ for instance, he takes on the ‘‘ignorance of and contempt for the gay movement,’’ as well as the advocacy for monogamy that is demonstrated by Kramer’s play, The Normal Heart.53 Fifteen years later, in ‘‘Sex and Sensibility’’ Crimp again engages with Kramer’s ‘‘moralistic attacks . . . on gay men’s sexual desires, behaviors, and public sexual spaces.’’54 Writers like Kramer, Crimp contends, ‘‘virtually invite a restigmatization of AIDS’’ by condemning gay men for spreading the AIDS virus without attempting to understand why they might have unsafe sex.55 Unlike Crimp, Edelman does not position himself explicitly against Kramer’s views; however, his careful analysis of various sites of discourse about HIV transmission belies the same discomfort with Kramer’s perspectives. Edelman compares Kramer’s rebuke of members of the gay community for ‘‘killing each other’’ through their failure to organize with Patrick Buchanan’s argument that homosexuals (and others with AIDS) ‘‘have killed themselves because they could not or would not control their suicidal appetites.’’56 Given Buchanan’s extreme homophobia and his notorious proclamations that AIDS is ‘‘nature’s retribution’’ for sexual deviance, the linkage of his remarks with Kramer’s is surely an unexpected uptake of both texts.57 Edelman suggests that while Kramer and Buchanan undoubtedly had different motivations for their comments, the similarity of their polemics ‘‘certainly bespeaks a political investment in a shared ideology of the subject.’’58 In other words, though Edelman does not criticize Kramer at the level of his overt positions, he suggests that the ideology of the subject that Kramer endorses is ultimately problematic for progressive gay and lesbian politics.59 In contrast to Kramer’s writings and speeches, which are directed toward popular audiences and delivered through mainstream newspapers and magazines or in public venues, both Crimp’s and Edelman’s essays appear primarily in academic journals, conferences, and books. Hence, the controversies of AIDS activism and gay and lesbian politics are resituated, textualized, and critically engaged within the realm of academic queer theory. Importantly, it is only through Crimp’s or Edelman’s own essays that their debates with Kramer might be said to take place; if the arguments described in their writing reflect an actual conversation that occurred elsewhere, it is not available to those reading the essays, and a refutation of their positions is not Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency 311 developed in Kramer’s work. That is, Kramer’s position appears for queer theorists only as represented by other queer theorists; Kramer himself is not published in the same journals or books, and he does not similarly critique his academic opponents. Furthermore, there is a temporal gap between the publication or delivery of his words and the academic criticism that is generated in response. In some cases, this delay is over a decade long, as in the recirculation of Crimp’s critiques of Kramer in his 2002 book. The stakes of this ‘‘conversation’’ between Kramer and certain queer theorists, then, are clearly not equal for both parties. Although Kramer does not engage Crimp or Edelman (and their critiques do not reach Kramer’s primary audiences), his polemics are the subject of fervent examination and debate by queer theorists. This is not merely a matter of such polemics being cited in a range of discursive contexts, nor of queer theorists’ disagreement with Kramer’s views; rather, the uptake of his work enables a certain kind of institutional agency and serves disciplinary functions for the field of queer theory. The frequent refutations of Kramer’s work by early queer theorists perform a definitional and territorial gesture whereby queer theory’s unique theoretical and political identity is staked out in the world of academia. Queer theory, supported institutionally by anthologies, text books, special journal issues, courses, conferences, and so on, enables agency for those who work, write, and teach in its name. But this agency is premised on an emphatic labeling of Kramer and his work as ‘‘not queer,’’ a move that denies the unpredictability of the effects of polemics in particular and rhetorical agency in general. Furthermore, because Kramer’s polemics are delivered in a form that flouts conventions of reason and logical argumentation, they are useful to queer theorists as a foil to the highly complex, rational, and theoretically based language of queer theory. They also serve as a foothold for queer academic work by providing the necessary link to politics and urgent contemporary issues. In other words, the debates with Kramer help facilitate queer theory’s claim to political interventions and effects, while the emphatic condemnation of his polemical, moralistic form underscores queer theory’s merit as an academic pursuit. In short, Kramer’s polemics become a favorite target of queer theorists, and academic texts aimed at criticizing Kramer’s views are canonized in this new field; certainly, these effects, catalyzed by the polemical form of his work, vastly exceed and perhaps even contradict Kramer’s intentions. Ironically, then, the discipline that claims to exploit the queer underpinnings of the normative social order actually gets it grip in academia by refusing the queerness of the polemical form; the agency of queer theorists in the academy arises from the provisional deferral of queerness. The academic uptake of Kramer’s polemical discourse therefore demonstrates that form enables but does not determine a text’s effects, and highlights the gap between the rhetorical act and effectivity. This gap is especially evident in polemics, but it is not unique to this form; rather, polemics draw attention to the undecidability that marks all language and that functions as the economy out of which all agency arises. As a form that makes this undecidability especially available to exploration and exploitation, the polemic is productively queer. Again, queerness refers here not to 312 E. J. Rand sexual difference or to a resistant stance, but to the gap or unpredictable relationship between an intending agent and the effects of an action. This definitional move unhinges queerness from a specific sexual or political referent, but does not desexualize or depoliticize the implications of the queerness of agency. As Edelman argues in his discussion of homosexuality’s relationship to language and writing, homosexuality is not only available to signification, but also comes to ‘‘signify the instability of the signifying function per se, the arbitrary and tenuous nature of the relationship between any signifier and signified.’’60 It is not merely that homosexuality is the binary opposite of heterosexuality, then, but that homosexuality also marks ‘‘the potential permeability of every sexual signifier*and by extension, of every signifier as such*by an ‘alien’ signification.’’61 Thus, Edelman notes that sexuality is always already embedded in language; more importantly, he contends that it is homosexuality in particular that both enables and perpetually destabilizes language’s signifying function.62 Similarly, I understand queerness as both the resource through which rhetorical agency is possible, as well as the excess and unpredictability that shape the dispersion of effects of a rhetorical act. Any instance of rhetorical agency arises from a catachrestic but provisional gesture that defers temporarily the possibility of acting or speaking otherwise and that inaugurates the illusion of the intending subject: as queer theorists stake out a particular definition and political project for ‘‘queer’’ through their opposition to Kramer, it is precisely that which is the most queer*the excessive and unpredictable character of Kramer’s polemics*that is deferred.63 The vehemence with which queer theorists tend to repudiate Kramer’s polemics bespeaks the importance of this definitional gesture, whereby the deferral of the queerness of polemics enables the agency of queer theory as an academic discipline. Thus, I label the undecidability of polemics as queer neither capriciously nor arbitrarily; rather, I make this assignation precisely because of the relevance of the queer to the exercise of rhetorical agency in this situation. By divorcing queerness from specific categories of identity or brands of politics, I am highlighting the polemical form*regardless of the positions expressed therein*as a means for emphasizing and exploring the riskiness and undecidability of acting, and as an actualization of the queerness of rhetorical agency. The risk of rhetorical action is, as Jacques Derrida contends, the necessary and productive condition from which all language arises. Refuting the position that risk is external to language, and that it is a trap that must be avoided, he contends that risk is instead language’s ‘‘internal and positive condition of possibility’’ or its ‘‘very force and law of . . . emergence.’’64 Judith Butler also draws on the productive possibilities of risk in her discussion of hate speech. She contends that although the repetition of injurious terms always risks the intensification of the original injury, it also opens up the possibility for these words to signify otherwise. Therefore, embedded in the risk of injury is the potential for ‘‘something we might still call agency, the repetition of an originary subordination for another purpose, one whose future is partially open.’’65 Agency, then, emerges not as the ability to create intentionally a certain set of effects, but as a process made possible by the very undecidability or riskiness of those effects. Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency 313 While Butler is interested here in iterability and risk for their potential in unsettling existing and sedimented significations, I am more concerned with how the risks of language and action are managed when agency is actualized. Specifically, I am suggesting that the possibility for agency emerges from the undecidability and riskiness of language, but that Kramer’s polemics also reveal the way in which any uptake (no matter how unexpected) operates to determine, at least provisionally, a specific meaning and effect for the text. Queer theorists write against Kramer not simply because they disagree with him, then, but because by deferring the excesses and undecidability of his polemical form*and therefore temporarily halting the possibility for his texts to work otherwise*they also control the risks of language and enable rhetorical agency. Furthermore, the risks of language accentuated in polemics produce the possibility for their political ‘‘failure’’: the possibility that the polemic’s effects may exceed, contradict, or otherwise be non-identical to the polemicist’s intentions.66 While the ‘‘success’’ of a polemic would imply the fulfillment of a predetermined goal, a polemic may ‘‘fail’’ to be consistent with the author’s intentions and yet still have significant effects. The association between failure and polemics, then, has less to do with evaluations of success than with questions of effectivity. As I have shown, the fact that Kramer’s polemics may fail, or may be uncontrollable, certainly does not mean that they have not been highly effective and influential in mobilizing AIDS activism. In fact, this potential for failure, which arises from the risks of language and is a founding condition of polemics, is productive of rhetorical agency. As Arditi and Valentine put it, ‘‘Polemic occurs in proportion to the extent that polemical intention fails. . . . Polemic does not command. Polemicization takes place precisely because such omnipotence is impossible. Put differently, polemicization arises from the failure of a will over that which is heteronomous to it.’’67 The ‘‘failure’’ of a polemic to do exactly as its author intended is thus the very resource for its productivity. In a polemic’s failure is the possibility for rhetorical agency, or for the polemic to be taken up and made to work in ways that are not predetermined by its original author and context. For Arditi and Valentine, the polemic does not merely intervene in an argument; it also introduces a critical gap through which the possibility of political dissent arises. The gap that they describe exists between the rules governing political participation and the actualization of political practice: when those participating in a dispute draw on the rules of citizenship and equality or norms of argumentation, they both utilize or cite those rules while also reconfiguring them. This argument is premised on Derrida’s principle of iterability, which suggests that any communication ‘‘must be repeatable*iterable*in the absolute absence of the receiver or of any empirically determinable collectivity of receivers.’’68 Furthermore, Derrida stresses that this iterability of language is ‘‘neither an accident nor an anomaly,’’ but is the very condition of its possibility.69 It is by virtue of the iterability of the rules of political participation that polemics can intervene both to cite and redefine the rules and therefore potentially to promote radical social change. Likewise, insisting on this gap 314 E. J. Rand as the enactment of and possibility for politics necessarily introduces risk, highlighting the potential for the failure of the sovereignty of intentionality. The Queer Risks of Agency It is precisely the emphasis on the potential for failure, the unpredictability of effects, and the risky nature of acting that I am claiming as the queerness of agency. Queerness appears as the general economy of undecidability from which agency emerges; as one modality of agency, then, rhetorical agency has queerness as its very condition of possibility. The polemic, as an excessive form whose volatility and tendency to be taken up in unexpected ways make the risk and undecidability of rhetorical agency especially apparent, is therefore productively queer. Kramer’s polemics are not unique in their unpredictability, but given the specific ways in which they have acquired force in the disciplinary attempt to define ‘‘queer,’’ they highlight the queerness that inhabits any instance of rhetorical agency. By considering polemics in terms of queerness, I do not mean to suggest a necessary relation to a particular political agenda: the substance of polemics and the views they endorse need not be progressive, radical, or resistant. In fact, redeeming the polemic’s productivity as a rhetorical form*regardless of content*takes seriously the centrality of risk and unpredictability to agency. That is, it admits that polemics are likely to be employed across a range of political perspectives and toward a variety of ends (whether admirable or distasteful), and that the effectivity of any given polemic is never fully determined by its substance or intention. This is a move that de-essentializes both the polemical form and queerness itself. When ‘‘queer,’’ disconnected from a particular sexual identity or political stance, is used to label the inevitable contingency of rhetorical agency, the potentially disruptive and radical force of the term is reconfigured and relocated. Rather than suggesting that queerness haunts the heteronormative from the outside, constantly threatening to impinge on its borders, I am proposing instead that it is only by virtue of the undecidability of queerness that the heteronormative can be articulated and institutionalized. This is not to say that all rhetorical agency or all discourse is queer, but that all rhetorical agency and all discourse does, in fact, depend on the queer, or at least on the possibility for queerness to be temporarily deferred. And therefore the trace of this founding exclusion*an indelible queer stain, if you will* always remains to inhabit and trouble all rhetorical agency. By emphasizing the queerness that marks Kramer’s polemical form, I hope not only to indulge in my own bit of queer polemicization, but to do so in a manner that contributes to the rhetorical scholarship on the relationship between form and agency. I want to suggest that without a rigorous and theoretically rich attention to form, discussions of rhetorical agency cannot sufficiently account for the extent to which the stylistic choices of the rhetor and the intelligibility of the discourse are both enabled and constrained by formal conventions. The formal features of a text help determine the text’s effects, but these effects are never determined, and the possibility for radical transformation exists alongside the possibility for retrenchment. Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency 315 Additionally, by refusing the impulse to define queerness in terms of its resistant potential and instead conceiving of it as a resource for perpetual undecidability and risk, I mean to underscore the contingent nature of rhetoric and rhetorical agency. After all, the ability to ascribe resistance to any action or text exists only because that action or text could also be otherwise; rhetorical agency persists only insofar as the meaning and effects of one’s rhetorical acts are not settled in advance. Larry Kramer’s polemics appear here, then, not only as a site from which to rethink the relationship between form and rhetorical agency, but also, through my engagement with these texts, as a performance of the unpredictability of uptake, force, and effects*the queerness of rhetorical agency*that I propose is the condition of possibility for any rhetorical act. Notes [1] [2] [3] Arthur D. Kahn, The Many Faces of Gay: Activists Who Are Changing the Nation (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 230
32. I recognize that there is some opposition to the use of the term ‘‘queer,’’ especially in relation to its gendered, raced, and classed implications. While I want to note these criticisms of the biases of ‘‘queer,’’ I use the term here not only because it is the territory of ‘‘queer’’ that is being defined through queer theorists’ rejection of Kramer, but also because the controversy and lack of a clear referent that ‘‘queer’’ implies are valuable and appropriate to my characterization of the undecidability of agency. On ‘‘queer’’ as a contested term, see Brett Beemyn and Mickey Eliason, eds., Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Anthology (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 1
20; Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 101
26; Sheila Jeffreys, ‘‘The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians: Sexuality in the Academy,’’ Women’s Studies International Forum 17 (1994): 459
72; Simon Watney, ‘‘Homosexual, Gay or Queer? Activism, Outing and the Politics of Sexual Identities,’’ Outrage, April 1992, 18
22. In the last several years, numerous authors have considered rhetorical agency in various manners in the pages of the Quarterly Journal of Speech. See, for example: Tasha N. Dubriwny, ‘‘Consciousness-Raising as Collective Rhetoric: The Articulation of Experience in the Redstockings’ Abortion Speak-out of 1969,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 395
422; Lisa Keränen, ‘‘‘Cause Someday We All Die’: Rhetoric, Agency, and the Case of the ‘Patient’ Preferences Worksheet,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007): 179
210; Nathan Stormer, ‘‘Articulation: A Working Paper on Rhetoric and Taxis,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 257
84; Bradford Vivian, ‘‘Neoliberal Epideictic: Rhetorical Form and Commemorative Politics on September 11, 2002,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 1
26; Eric King Watts, ‘‘‘Voice’ and ‘Voicelessness’ in Rhetorical Studies,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 87 (2001): 179
96. Issues of rhetorical agency also have been pursued extensively in Rhetoric Society Quarterly (in part responding to the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies’ discussions on the topic); see Cheryl Geisler, ‘‘How Ought We to Understand the Concept of Rhetorical Agency? Report from the ARS,’’ RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34 (2004): 9
17; Christian Lundberg and Joshua Gunn, ‘‘‘Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications?’ Agency, Ontotheology, and the Death of the Humanist Subject, or, Continuing the ARS Conversation,’’ RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35 (2005): 83
105; Cheryl Geisler, ‘‘Teaching the Post-Modern Rhetor: Continuing the Conversation on Rhetorical Agency,’’ RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35 (2005): 107
13. 316 E. J. Rand [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, ‘‘Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,’’ Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies 2 (2005): 7. Campbell, ‘‘Agency,’’ 7. Campbell, ‘‘Agency,’’ 3. Campbell, ‘‘Agency,’’ 7. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158. Darrel Enck-Wanzer, ‘‘Trashing the System: Social Movement, Intersectional Rhetoric, and Collective Agency in the Young Lords Organization’s Garbage Offensive,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 174
201. By ‘‘sites’’ or ‘‘positions’’ I do not mean to imply literal spaces within institutions. Rather, I am referring to the way in which rhetorical forms can function as nodes within networks of institutional power, and through which agency can be exercised. This is not to deny that power certainly constitutes and regulates literal spaces within institutions, but my primary concern here is with the positioning of discourses within networks of power. For an interesting discussion of the relationship between space, textuality, and the political, see Doreen B. Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005). Kramer is known for helping to found both GMHC and ACT UP, but his role in each organization has been controversial. He split with GMHC over a difference of opinion regarding the group’s focus, and his claims to being an important founding figure of ACT UP have been hotly disputed by activists and critics alike. See, for example, ‘‘ACT UP Capsule History,’’ ACT UP/New York, http://www.actupny.org/documents/capsule-home.html/; Maxine Wolfe, ‘‘Make It Work for You: Academia and Political Organizing in Lesbian and Gay Communities,’’ ACT UP/New York, http://www.actupny.org/documents/academia.html/. Simon Watney, foreword to Reports from the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist, by Larry Kramer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), xv
xxix; David France, ‘‘The Angry Prophet Is Dying,’’ Newsweek, June 11, 2001, 43; Sarah Bond et al., ‘‘Editors’ Choice: Top Ten Crusaders for Social Justice,’’ INTHEFRAY, November 11, 2003, http://inthefray.com/html/ article.php?sid 110&mode thread&order 0/. Activist groups that embraced the new radical queer politics of visibility, spectacle, antiassimilationism, and camp included ACT UP, Queer Nation, Sex Panic!, and the Lesbian Avengers, to name just a few. For an analysis of the newly emergent queer politics, see Cathy J. Cohen, ‘‘Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?’’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3 (1997): 437
65. Kramer has not ceased to be active and influential in the gay community. On 7 November 2004 he gave a lengthy speech titled ‘‘The Tragedy of Today’s Gays’’ at Cooper Union in New York City. Though it began with Kramer’s concern about the results of the recent 2004 presidential election, the bulk of this speech*like Kramer’s earlier speeches*dealt with the lack of responsibility and organization within the gay community. For a reprint of the speech, see Larry Kramer, ‘‘The Tragedy of Today’s Gays: An Address to the Gay Community, address given at Cooper Union in New York City, New York, November 7, 2004, http:// www.aegis.com/news/MISC/2004/LK041101.html/. Larry Kramer, Reports from the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 413. ‘‘Larry Kramer: America’s Angriest AIDS Activist,’’ Advocate, December 1, 1992; France, ‘‘Angry Prophet,’’ 43. Kathryn Thomas Flannery, ‘‘The Passion of Conviction: Reclaiming Polemic for a Reading of Second-Wave Feminism,’’ Rhetoric Review 20 (2001): 113
29; Jonathan Crewe, ‘‘Can Polemic Be Ethical? A Response to Michel Foucault,’’ in Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, ed. Jane Gallop (New York: Routledge, 2004), 135
52. Though anger is the primary emotion generally associated with polemics, Crewe also makes a case for acknowledging the ways in which polemics might be entertaining or comedic. This does not necessarily indicate that the Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] [48] [49] [50] 317 polemic itself is funny or that the speaker intends to be amusing; rather, it emphasizes the tendency for polemics to have unpredictable effects. Kramer, Reports, 45. Flannery, ‘‘Passion of Conviction,’’ 116
17 as borrowed from Kenneth J. E. Graham, The Performance of Conviction: Plainness and Rhetoric in the Early English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 14. Graham, Performance of Conviction, 15
16. Graham, Performance of Conviction, 14. Kramer, Reports, 448. In an essay about Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, John Angus Campbell contends that the ‘‘intensely personal’’ quality of Darwin’s work creates a bond between the author and his readers and presents a reality that is ‘‘not only objective, but personal.’’ John Angus Campbell, ‘‘The Polemical Mr. Darwin,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 385. Perhaps best known for his groundbreaking book, The Celluloid Closet, Russo died of AIDS in 1990. Kramer, Reports, 369. Kramer, Reports, 371. Kramer, Reports, 372. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault’’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 381. Kramer, Reports, xxxiii. Kramer, Reports, xxxiii. Watney, ‘‘Foreword,’’ xviii; France, ‘‘Angry Prophet,’’ 43. Kramer, Reports, xxxiii. Kramer, Reports, 450. Campbell, ‘‘Polemical Mr. Darwin,’’ 387. Flannery, ‘‘Passion of Conviction,’’ 120. Edwin Black, ‘‘The Second Persona,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 56 (1970): 109
19; Philip Wander, ‘‘The Third Persona: An Ideological Turn in Rhetorical Theory,’’ Central States Speech Journal 35 (1984): 197
216; Charles E. Morris III, ‘‘Pink Herring and the Fourth Persona: J. Edgar Hoover’s Sex Crime Panic,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 228
44. Foucault, ‘‘Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations,’’ 382. Kramer, Reports, 46. Kramer, Reports, 450. Foucault, ‘‘Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations,’’ 382. Flannery, ‘‘Passion of Conviction,’’ 122. See, for example, Douglas Crimp, ‘‘Sex and Sensibility, or Sense and Sexuality,’’ in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 281
301; and Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Flannery, ‘‘Passion of Conviction,’’ 127. John H. Smith, ‘‘Rhetorical Polemics and the Dialectics of Kritik in Hegel’s Jena Essays,’’ Philosophy and Rhetoric 18 (1985): 31
57. Smith, ‘‘Rhetorical Polemics,’’ 35. Benjamin Arditi and Jeremy Valentine, Polemicization: The Contingency of the Commonplace (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 137. Arditi and Valentine, Polemicization, 137. Michael Warner, ‘‘Publics and Counterpublics,’’ Public Culture 14 (2002): 51. Warner, ‘‘Publics and Counterpublics,’’ 51. The notion of ‘‘effectivity’’ that I employ is borrowed from Grossberg’s explanation of ‘‘the multidimensionality of effects . . . the connections that exist between disparate points as they traverse different planes of realms of effects,’’ as well as Foucault’s concept of ‘‘dispersion’’ 318 E. J. Rand [51] [52] [53] [54] [55] [56] [57] [58] [59] [60] [61] [62] [63] [64] [65] and Miller’s discussion of the conjunctural practices of institutional uptake. See Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 50
51; Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 37
39, 71
76; Toby Miller, The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 173
217. Lloyd Bitzer argues that forms arise from recurring rhetorical situations, and influence what can be said in a given situation as well as how an audience comes to understand or make sense of what is said. See Lloyd F. Bitzer, ‘‘The Rhetorical Situation,’’ Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (1968): 13. Kenneth Burke, ‘‘Lexicon Rhetoricae,’’ in Counter-Statement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1931), 157. Douglas Crimp, ‘‘How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,’’ in Melancholia and Moralism, 56
57. Crimp, ‘‘Sex and Sensibility,’’ 286. Crimp, ‘‘Sex and Sensibility,’’ 287. Lee Edelman, ‘‘The Mirror and the Tank,’’ in Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 107. First quote from Kramer, ‘‘Who Killed Vito Russo?’’ OutWeek 86, February 20, 1991, 26. Second quote from Patrick Buchanan, New York Post, June 26, 1991, cited in ‘‘Media Watch: Buchanan on Essex,’’ New York Native, 429, July 8, 1991, 15. See, for example: Robert Scheer, ‘‘AIDS Stigma Hampering a Solution,’’ Los Angeles Times, November 28, 1986; Susan Yoachum, ‘‘Buchanan Calls AIDS ‘Retribution:’ Gays Angered by His Bid to Win Bible Belt Votes,’’ San Francisco Chronicle, February 28, 1992. Edelman, ‘‘Mirror and the Tank,’’ 107. The designation of a body of work as ‘‘queer theory’’ has occurred only retrospectively and I do not mean to attribute to queer theorists a coherent position in regard to Kramer’s polemics or queer politics. See, for example, Douglas Crimp’s critique of Edelman’s treatment of ACT UP’s ‘‘Silence Death’’ symbol in ‘‘Mourning and Militancy,’’ in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on Aids and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 129
49. Edelman, ‘‘Homographesis,’’ 6. Edelman, ‘‘Homographesis,’’ 7. For other treatments of the ways that language reveals and reproduces norms of sexuality, see: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978); Gayle Rubin, ‘‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,’’ in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (London, UK: Pandora Press, 1992), 267
319; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992). As Gayatri Spivak puts it in The Post Colonial Critic, being able to act requires that ‘‘the subject is always centered as a subject.’’ She later noted that agency arises from a metonymic process of displacement, an essentializing move whereby one emerges as an agent only insofar as a part of oneself stands in for the whole. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The PostColonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990), 104; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘‘Agency’’ (lecture given at University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, 4 October 2004). Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Signature Event Context,’’ in Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 17. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 38. Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency [66] [67] [68] [69] 319 Indeed, this possibility for failure both plagues and animates the force and meaning of all language; it is not that failure is unique to polemics, but that the vehemence of polemics makes their failures all the more dramatic. For more on the inherent failures of language and meaning, see J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); Butler, Excitable Speech; Derrida, Limited Inc; Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). Arditi and Valentine, Polemicization, 33. Derrida, ‘‘Signature,’’ 7. Derrida, ‘‘Signature,’’ 12.