On the apocalyptic sublime

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On the apocalyptic sublimeJoshua Gunn a & David E. Beard aa Department of Speech Communication , University ofMinnesota , Minneapolis, MN, 55455 E-mail:Published online: 01 Apr 2009.

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I ON THE APOCALYPTIC SUBLIME

Joshua Gunn and David E. Beard

In this essay we argue that an eschatological discourse we term the "apocalyptic sublime"has emerged, as the postmodern alternative to traditional apocalyptic rhetoric. Drawing onthe work of Frank Kermode and Jean Baudrillard, the essay isolates two key features of theapocalyptic sublime as (a) a reliance on non-linear temporality and (b) a kind of destabi-lized subjectivity characteristic of that described in the sublime theories of Edmund Burkeand Immanuel Kant. The apocalyptic sublime is then used to explain the rhetorical dimen-sions of the project for a Critical Rhetoric begun by Raymie McKerrow in the late 1980s.

I was entering the period of the rest of my life from another point of view, in astate of complete irony with respect to what had gone before. When there is nofundamental passion, when life or love disappears, there is no longer any possi-bility of a multiplicity of modalities, with respect to love or existence.... Deathis an event that has always already taken place.

Jean Baudrillard (1987, p. 80)

I n an outrageous parody of the apocalyptic cults featured in our tabloid newspapersfor the last decade, several hundred camping pranksters converged on Sherman,New York to celebrate "X-Day," July 5, 1998. "Reverend" Ivan Stang, the parodist

responsible for the "Church of the Sub-Genius," which sponsored the event, claimedthat the end of the world was set to begin at seven o'clock in the morning. Only card-carrying, dues-paying Sub-Genii would be spared from the cataclysm. According to animaginary church messiah, the occulted "Bob Dobbs," the saved would be beamed upand into space vessels controlled by alien "sex-goddesses" for a cosmic Saturnalia in thestars. Those remaining on earth were to be destroyed (Yuen, 1998, p. Cl; also seeDuchez, 1995, p. B3).

Of course, the end of the world did not occur. After a good deal of revelry, sporting,and "sex," Stang announced that perhaps he had inverted the napkin on which Dobbshad recorded the date before retreating into the heavens. The end of the world, Stanglater claimed, will actually occur on July 5, 8661.

Obviously the celebration was a sham—a reason to make money, as Stang freelyadmits. Stang's revision of the date of the cataclysm, however, knowingly parallels oneof the most visible features of traditional apocalyptic discourse: the prediction and reca-libration of a fixed date for the end of humankind. Other popular apocalyptic dis-courses may not set calendar dates for blowout parties in upstate New York, but they dononetheless rely heavily upon a sense of impending cataclysm, catastrophe, or crisis.

All apocalyptic discourses, from the parodic to the deadly serious, emphasize an escha-tology, or a theory of ends.1 These discourses locate meaning within a narrative structurethat presupposes the resolution provided by a "conclusion" most often, the "end ofthe world." Traditionally, for apocalyptic rhetoric to function both rhetor and audience

Joshua Gunn, Department of Speech-Communication, and David E. Beard, Department of Rhetoric, University of Minne-sota. The authors would like to thank R. L. Scott for his advice regarding previous drafts of this essay. Address correspon-dence to the first author at Department of Speech Communication, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, orby electronic mail to [email protected].

SOUTHERN COMMUNICATION JOURNAL, Volume 65, Number 4, Summer 2000

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270 THE SOUTHERN COMMUNICATION JOURNAL

must believe that this end or resolution will indeed occur either sooner or later. Withinrhetorical studies, Barry Brummett and Stephen O'Leary have provided us with internallyconsistent and useful theoretical frames with which to interpret discourses obsessed withcataclysmic ends and contemporary emblems of decay. In the dawn of the new millen-nium, Brummett's and O'Leary's calls for the theorizing of apocalyptic discourses from arhetorical perspective are timely. From "cult" television series such as The X-Files and Millen-nium, to the mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cult, we are immersed in tales of ends.

We believe, however, that the current rhetorical models of apocalyptic rhetoricexclude many significant, contemporary apocalyptic discourses for two reasons. First,many rhetorical scholars are limited by their choice of exemplars, culled from main-stream religious narratives to the exclusion of less visible apocalyptic discourses. Sec-ond, apocalyptic scholars in a number of disciplines often overlook the proliferation ofpostmodern theorizations of the apocalyptic that have far-reaching political implica-tions. Our goal in this essay is to widen our critical frame to obviate these limitations.

To this end we make three moves. First, we expand Brummett's theory of the tradi-tional, "imminent" kind of apocalyptic by examining the work of literary critic FrankKermode and cultural critic Jean Baudrillard. Combined, Kermode and Baudrillardinform an alternate model of non-religious, apocalyptic thinking that situates apoca-lypse in a state of perpetual crisis without end, an "immanent" apocalyptic.

Second, we describe the relationship between immanent apocalyptic discourses anda destabilized subject position informed by the concept of the sublime. Faced with thedenial of resolution characteristic of the immanent apocalyptic, we suggest that therhetor and audience suffer a destabilized sense of self akin to the debilitating experi-ence of confronting a sublime object. We term the resulting theoretical hybrid the"apocalyptic sublime," a subgenre of immanent apocalyptic discourse that we argue isdeserving of more scholarly attention.

Third, to demonstrate the critical work that our understanding of apocalyptic dis-course is capable of conducting, we use our perspective to explain the rhetoricaldimensions of the project for a Critical Rhetoric begun by Raymie McKerrow in the late1980s. In spite of the complexity of McKerrow's theoretical terrain, we argue that themove to establish a Critical Rhetoric as a disciplinary project can be understood profit-ably as a postmodern, apocalyptic gesture. We think that the project for a Critical Rhet-oric is a particularly influential example of the pervasiveness of the apocalyptic sublimewithin theoretical discourse. This means, of course, that we are suggesting that thework academics do is by no means immune to the economic and cultural influencesthat shape the texts of the popular and elite cultures traditionally studied. We hope,however, that the critical light that our model for the apocalyptic sublime casts on thisbody of literature will encourage the reflexive goals of a Critical Rhetoric and join inthe continual rethinking of contemporary theory in all areas of communication studies.

EXPANDING APOCALYPTIC FORM

The Limits of Traditional Apocalyptic

In general, apocalyptic rhetoric is an eschatological "mode of thought and dis-course" that "empowers its audience to live in a time of disorientation and disorder"(Brummett, 1991, p. 9). Both Brummett's (1991) and O'Leary's (1994) influentialbooks on the subject seek to uncover the appeal of apocalyptic rhetoric by attending toa Burkean understanding of conventional form (see Burke, 1968, pp. 29-44). Brum-mett and O'Leary locate the appeal of apocalyptic in a narrative structure, the end ofwhich provides a site of cathexis where individuals are encouraged to identify varioussocial anxieties as intuitions of an impending crisis (for Brummett, anxieties rangingfrom recent natural disasters to socioeconomic conditions; for O'Leary, the more

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ON THE APOCALYPTIC SUBLIME 271

abstract human need to grapple with the "problem of evil"; also see Smelser 1962). Forbrevity, we will confine our discussion of traditional apocalyptic patterns to Brummett's(1991) careful and exhaustively researched account.

After analyzing the discourse of a number of successful religious leaders, Brummettsuggests that the apocalyptic is a generic, conventional form of discourse that (a) arisesmost often in periods of anomie or crisis, and (b) reveals a cosmic "system of order" asan assurance to audiences experiencing any number of social stresses. The system oforder revealed is usually couched in historical terms, and abides a linear or telic under-standing of history's progression toward some ultimate or final end. The progression ofhistory in apocalyptic discourse, suggests Brummett, is "telic" in both senses of theterm: the system of order strives toward some goal, and this goal, in the Aristotelian castof telos, is perceived to be natural and inevitable. The final end of this cosmic striving iseither the millennium, a period "of peace, prosperity and happiness" (p. 17, nl), or theapocalypse proper, a great calamity or time of extreme change and confusion (pp. 24-44). Further, for Brummett, the difference between the ends described by a given apoc-alyptic (either millennium or apocalypse) determines whether the discourse is "premil-lennial" or "postmillennial." The premillennial discourse suggests that the apocalypse isthe cataclysmic end of all history that precedes the millennium. The postmillennial dis-course suggests that the millennium precedes the apocalypse (pp. 24-44).

So far, we have termed the apocalyptic that both Brummett and O'Leary describe"traditional." Although we agree that this traditional account of apocalyptic discoursedescribes many—if not most—of the apocalyptic discourses popular today, we are hesi-tant to agree with Brummett that such an account exhausts the typology of contempo-rary apocalyptic. More specifically, we disagree with the claim that contemporaryapocalyptic rhetoric must reveal an underlying system of order parasitic on a linear ortelic understanding of history. Rather, we believe that there are increasingly more apoc-alyptic discourses that eschew resolutions rooted in telic visions of history, yet neverthe-less continue to reveal or promise to reveal underlying systems of order in response toperceived social crises.

Further, apocalyptic discourses are emerging in response to fundamental changesin the political and material conditions of the social world. In turn, the crises that tradi-tional apocalyptic discourse addresses have changed. New media technologies (such asthe Internet) pose challenges to received notions of selfhood and social reality thatwere previously unimaginable, in turn making different kinds of crises possible. Welook to the modernist literary critic Frank Kermode to describe one of the conse-quences of the rapid technological and economic transformations of this century: aconceptualization of history in which ours is a time "in no intelligible relation to thepast, and no predictable relation to the future" (1967, p. 102). We also look to theoristsof the "postmodern condition" such as Jean Baudrillard and Francios Lyotard, whospeak to the move from the end-directed, deterministic thinking that underlies tradi-tional apocalyptic, and underscore a growing awareness of the fragility of subjectivity—that is, the notion that the "individual" is the sum total of any number of constructedand contradictory "selves"—in the wake of these shifts (see Silverman, 1983, pp. 126-193). The changes in the 20th century condition that have spurred our analysis of theapocalyptic sublime are theorized in a variety of different ways by many scholars. Wehope that our syncretistic perspective may help scholars better understand the rhetori-cal dimensions of postmodern apocalyptics presently with us, as well as those that arelikely to confront us in the near future.

Imminence and Immanence

In our articulating a postmodern brand of apocalyptic, Frank Kermode's distinctionbetween what he terms "imminent" and "immanent" apocalypse is a helpful starting

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point. In his study of apocalypse in literature, Kermode (1967) argues that 20th centuryliterature displays a changing mode of temporality, and in turn, different "paradigms ofapocalypse" (p. 28). He claims that traditional, imminent apocalyptic discourse isgrounded in a belief that the resolution to the chaos or anomie experienced by therhetor and audience is distinctively impending (1967, pp. 24-25). Kermode also claims,however, that apocalyptic discourse has changed in our time and has begun to functionin ways that deny resolution or final ends. He terms the emergence of this new kind ofdiscourse the "immanent" apocalyptic, which he claims operates as if the end werealready present. By "immanent" apocalypse Kermode does not mean that there is noexperience of "endings." Rather, the immanent apocalyptic redefines "ends"—and inturn disorients the audience—by collapsing linear temporality onto a prolonged expe-rience of the present, a punctuated intense moment in which "history and eschatology. . . are then the same thing" (1967, p. 25).2 In the imminent apocalyptic—premillen-nial or postmillennial—one anticipates endings. In the immanent apocalyptic, onerealizes she is (already) dwelling in the "end period."

Further, Kermode notes that unlike the traditional, imminent apocalyptic, theimmanent apocalypse "reflects our lack of confidence in ends, our mistrust of theapportioning of history into epochs of this and that" (1967, p. 101). Without confi-dence in historical progress and in the power of narrative resolution, subjects operatingwithin an immanent apocalyptic arena lose their foundation in a forward-lookingapproach toward a grand, cataclysmic ending. Without that foundation in linear pro-gression, individuals caught in an immanent apocalypse are trapped in a belief or acommitment to a state of "transition." According to Kermode, this state of transition ismarked by ambivalence and confusion. Subjects located within immanent apocalypticmodes of discourse may sense that "the twentieth century is the epoch of nothing posi-tive, only of transition. Since we move from transition to transition, we may supposethat we exist in no intelligible relation to the past, and no predictable relation to thefuture" (1967, p. 102).

We find Kermode's distinction between imminent and immanent apocalyptic indis-pensable. The former speaks to die telic cast of traditional apocalyptic narratives, manyof which continue to comfort audiences as we move across the millennial threshold.The latter, however, speaks to the familiar and increasingly common experience ofambivalence and confusion in end-states that is characteristic of a sense of perpetualtransition.

Kermode's notions parallel many later theories, including those of Jean Baudrillard(1987,1988,1989,1994), Dietmar Kamper (1989), Dieter Lenzen (1989), and FrancoisLyotard (1992, 1994). For instance, Baudrillard argues that traditional apocalyptic dis-courses have lost their authority: "Messianic hope was based on the reality of the Apoca-lypse. But. . . [we] shall never be allowed this dramatic illumination. Even the idea ofputting an end to our planet by atomic clash is superfluous" (1994, p. 119). Robbed ofbiblical or of nuclear apocalypse, Baudrillard argues diat we are doomed to "continueon with our self-destructive ways," without hope of resolution (1993, p. 99). Neverthe-less and despite the similarities between Kermode's work and that of later theorists,Kermode is no postmodern critic, and he resists the insecurity that is central to postmo-dernity. Richard Dellamora (1994) rightfully locates Kermode's anxiety over postmod-ern theory in Kermode's hope that "aesthetic form can have a regulative culturalsignificance," to counter social and aesthetic tendencies that he considers "antihuman-ist." Kermode would close the gates on any discussion of the postmodern condition, infavor of conservative, traditional, humanist notions of culture (Dellamora, 1994,pp. 110-112).

We differ from Kermode precisely because we recognize the conditions of postmo-dernity and the role that contemporary theory has in explaining them (our currentsense of self and of our social world). Put alternatively, Kermode rightly presages a post-

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modern apocalyptic, but does not account for the historical and material context forthe emergent discourse beyond the barbarisms of modern war implicit in his theory. Tobe fair, the technologies and advances in science—even perhaps theory itself—thatmight have led Kermode to account for a material context were not manifest when hefirst began thinking along these lines. Nevertheless, we believe that thinkers such asLyotard and Baudrillard are to be grappled with on their own terms, and that their the-ories of history and of subjectivity are areas that can inform Kermode's moderniststance, and in turn, account for the conditions that enable immanent apocalyptic dis-course. To this end we turn first to the mid-period work of Jean Baudrillard (from the1980s to the early 1990s). In this period of Baudrillard's career we find him busy con-tinuing the project of describing/modeling an immanent apocalyptic inclusive of tech-nological innovation and changing conceptions of temporality.

BAUDRILLARD AND APOCALYPSE

To inform better our understanding of the immanent apocalyptic, we extend thenotion of immanence through Jean Baudrillard's theory of temporality and history inthe postmodern age. Baudrillard's insights on history are grounded in his theory of"simulation," which is largely concerned with the Nietzschean observation that throughtheir history, humans have tended to forget that signs are representations of otherthings. In TheEcstasy of Communication ([henceforth Ecstasy] 1988) and The Illusion of theEnd ([henceforth Illusion] 1994), Baudrillard obsesses about the role of media technol-ogies in collapsing the distance between what we might describe as the "metaphorical"and the "real." Borrowing from Marshall McLuhan, Baudrillard terms the collapse ofthe distance between representations and reality, signs and their real counterparts,"implosion." When we occupy a space in which representations easily become simula-tions, Baudrillard argues, we are in "hyperreality." That we need a flickering screen tomake an event real or newsworthy, that "surfing the internet" has become mundaneactivity for many of us, signals the entrance into this new, postmodern realm of exist-ence:

The everydayness of the terrestrial habitat hypostatized in space marks the endof metaphysics, and signals the beginning of the era of hyperreality: that whichwas previously mentally projected, which was lived as a metaphor in the terres-trial habitat is from now on projected, entirely without metaphor, into theabsolute space of simulation. (1988, p. 16)

In our heavily iconic, mediated reality, we forget that our representations are copies(even copies of copies), and in turn they begin to seem "more real than the real." ForBaudrillard, the postmodern condition thus becomes the "triumph of simulacra"(1988, p. 103).

In Ecstasy, it is far from clear whether Baudrillard believes that the West has alreadysuccumbed to hyperreality or is simply under its yoke. What is clear, however, is thatBaudrillard believes absolute hyperreality is possible, and that it has some negative con-sequences. Two of these consequences, we suggest, are characteristic features of theimmanent apocalyptic: First, hyperreality reveals to us that linear temporality is possiblya simulation (a copy that we give "real" status); second, in hyperreality, human con-sciousness also is opened to the possibility that it, too, is a simulation in what Baudril-lard calls the "metastases of death" (1988, p. 45). We shall discuss each in turn below.

The first consequence of hyperreality concerns the reconfiguration of time con-sciousness and its effects on historical consciousness. In Illusion, Baudrillard denies his-tory both a "future" and an "end." Instead, he argues that history has become moreconceptually circular and that "at some point in the 1980s, history took a turn in theopposite direction," forsaking "the symbolic term of the year 2000" (1994, p. 11). Baud-

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rillard somewhat playfully announces ours is a time of "non-Euclidean fin de sieclespace," combining the spatial and temporal to describe history as folding upon itself inreversal (1994, p. 10) .* In Illusion, Baudrillard suggests that because of the ability oftechnologies of representation to aid us in our forgetting the real, we are freed fromthe tradition of aJudeo-Christian brand of linear temporality that has dominated theWest. Yet, at the same time that we are freed, we become mired in a historical space thatrecycles the waste of "defunct ideologies, bygone Utopias, dead concepts and fossilizedideas which continue to pollute our mental space" (1994, p. 26). Across both Ecstasyand Illusion the following claim seems to recur: The bulk of apocalyptic narratives hasbeen imminent precisely because time, and by extension history, has long been concep-tualized as having a final end. The emergence (or perhaps reappearance) of circular or"spherical" temporalities, hastened by technologies of representation that collapse thesymbolic distance between the sign and its referent, leaves us constantly negotiating ourbeing in—or forever just outside of—"the end." Hence, Baudrillard replaces the tradi-tional, imminent apocalypse by characterizing temporality in immanent terms.

The second consequence of Baudrillard's postmodern terrain—hyperreality—con-cerns notions of selfhood in the space of immanent temporality. In both Ecstasy andIllusion, Baudrillard describes the contemporary Western subject as continuously mov-ing through various "metastases of death." He first explains this concept in Ecstasy as aprocess of the material human body moving through three, increasingly abstract stagesof simulation ("metamorphoses," "metaphors," and "metastases" proper). In Illusion,however, the human subject succumbs to its more real existence in simulation, givingitself up to a new kind of "immortality." In this world,

there will be no end to anything, and all . . . endings will continue to unfoldslowly, tediously, recurrently, in that hysteresis of everything which, like nailsand hair, continues to grow after death. . . . At bottom, all these things arealready dead and, rather than have a happy or tragic resolution, a destiny, weshall have a thwarted end, a homeopathic end, an end distilled into all the var-ious metastases of death. (1994, p. 116)

Baudrillard's biological metaphors reiterate Kermode's concept of immanence as exist-ing in a state of perpetual transition, as things "continue to unfold slowly," even afterevents which once signaled an ending, like death. His metaphors also add what weidentify as a pessimism or committed apathy into the minds of those who engage inimmanent apocalyptic thinking. As human striving continues bereft of a traditionaleschatology, so too do nails and hair grow on a corpse after death. Further, Baudrillardcharacterizes the subject immersed in immanent apocalyptic as a human whose con-scious actions are metaphorically reduced to the kind of involuntarily metabolic func-tions of a corpse in a state of death.

Our discussion of this committed apathy or pessimism begs a description of the sub-ject position, inclusive of the feelings of the subject (usually experienced by a "self),that we think is implicated in immanent apocalyptic. Within traditional, imminentapocalyptics, Western individualism is assumed: a stable self moves in concert with oth-ers toward some particular religious or secular end (whether it be divine cataclysm, sec-ular Utopia, or individual prosperity vouchsafed by Darwin or God). But a rhetoricalaccount of imminent apocalyptic discourse demands, at least implicitly, a psychologicalexplanation: People respond to traditional apocalyptic discourses precisely because therevealed systems of order restore a sense of agency and sovereignty lost in the preced-ing crises. Since immanence denies linear temporality, however, we are left to wonderwhere one locates the subject, or how a dominant self is constituted within the subject.Although Baudrillard's work is expert at describing the "death of the subject" in partic-ularly dreadful terms, Baudrillard does not theorize the subject beyond its simulationand dissolution within the immanent apocalyptic (hence the "metastases of death").

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Moreover, Baudrillard approaches the possibility of the hyperreal, postmodern worldwith a committed stoicism (1988, p. 101), in turn forgoing a fuller description of theexperience of the subject within the immanent apocalyptic. Because the stability of thesubject is directly at issue in the postmodern world, we believe that accounting for thesubject's experience is central to any elaboration of the postmodern apocalyptic.Therefore, we shall turn elsewhere to describe the kind of experience that the imma-nent apocalyptic presents to the subject. Below, we detail why we believe that the sub-ject's experience of the immanent apocalyptic is best described as "sublime."

SUBJECTIVITY AND SUBLIMITY

In a recent article on the "aesthetic turn" in rhetorical studies, Robert Harimansummarized the "sublime" as "that preeminently aesthetic sense of wonder, expansive-ness, and awe that we experience in the face of natural beauty, technological power, orartistic perfection" (1998, p. 12). Hariman's definition of sublimity summarizes themost widespread understanding of the sublime experience, an understanding thatframes the sublime as an experience in which the subject is speechless while she con-fronts some impossibly grandiose or indescribable object of nature or of human design,such as a range of mountains, a tall skyscraper, or even a mushroom cloud produced bythe impact of atomic weapons (e.g., Nye, 1994). This common understanding of sub-limity is incomplete, however, for the theorization of the sublime experience from thelate 18th century onward has included, however implicitly, a theory of subjectivity thatis largely ignored by rhetoricians: In the sublime experience, the subject is revealed tobe a fragile, incomplete construction rather than an integral whole. Key to our discus-sion of the sublime, then, is the notion that the sublime marks an experience that fartranscends the taste of an indescribably good key lime pie, or even the sense of awe onehas when she is faced with a marvelous "cityscape . . . ablaze with electric light" (Hari-man, 1998, p. 12). The sublime experience is an unsettling and threatening one thatescapes even our attempts to theorize its occurrence. We shall briefly turn to the theo-ries of a young Edmund Burke and a Lyotardian reading of Immanuel Kant to helpexplain this exhilarating yet threatening undercurrent of sublimity.

By the time Edmund Burke composed his famous treatise on the sublime and thebeautiful in 1757, the term "sublime" had become a common one in the English lan-guage (Mishra, 1994, p. 30; also see Monk, 1960, pp. 43-62). In this well-known treatise,Burke opposed the experience of the sublime (which he wanted to call a "feeling")from that of the beautiful. Divorced from the experience of its more cognizable sibling,the sublime took on a more fearful connotation, for Burke located the source of thesublime in the feelings of pain and terror:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is tosay, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, oroperates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.... (1968,p. 39)

In other words, Burke suggests that the sublime is located in feelings that many of usmight recognize as the "fight or flight" response. It is this element of bodily threat andfear that occurs during the sublime experience that is often forgotten or simplyignored in rhetorical applications of the term.

For his time, Burke's theorization of the relationship between terror and sublimitywas exciting and new, for it was a psychological understanding of the sublime thatavoided "the well-beaten path that led through Boileau to Longinus," two standards ofsublime theory that tended to obsess on language proper (Monk, 1960, p. 106). Histheorization of "terror," while perhaps crude to some aesthetes and philosophers, for-ever changed Western understandings of the sublime (Monk, 1960, pp. 84-100).

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Immanuel Kant's treatment of aesthetics and taste, the Critique of Judgment (1951/1790), contains a theory of the sublime that continues down the psychological paths ofinquiry trailblazed by Burke.

In his "Analytic of the Sublime" (section 23 through 54 in the third critique), Kantoffers a more complex notion of sublimity and attends more fully to the mental conse-quences of the sublime experience. Although, like Burke, Kant attempts to establish apsychological foundation for sublimity, his understanding also theorizes two very impor-tant aspects of the sublime that Burke didn't: (a) the destabilization of the subject, and(b) the role of pleasure in the sublime experience. Regarding the former, Kant attemptsto explain what happens to the subject in reference to the role of reason and the under-standing. For Kant, the sublime experience has everything to do with "thinking's gettingcarried away" (Lyotard, 1994, p. 55), of reason's inability to contain the experience ofsome sublime object and of the imagination's inability to limit its presentation to theunderstanding. Lyotard summarizes Kant's characterization of the sublime as a "vio-lence" which "short-circuits thinking widi itself (1994, p. 54). For Kant the subjectbecomes destabilized because she can neither master nor think about the sublime objector her experience of it (Kant, 1951, p. 83). Faced with the limitations of her own mentalfaculties, the subject is then forced to contemplate "his or her own incompletion in thepresence of limitlessness, turbulent and ungraspable" (Mishra, 1994, p. 35).

Kant's understanding of sublimity is more useful than Burke's, however, because itincorporates the role of the subject's pleasure into the sublime experience. Burke wascorrect to isolate the sublime experience as a threatening one; Kant suggested that thisexperience is also strangely seductive. Kant explains this feature under the heading of"negative pleasure," and contrasts it with the "positive pleasure" one encounters with"natural" beauty:

Natural beauty... brings with it a purposiveness in its form by which the objectseems to be, as it were, preadapted to our judgment, and thus constitutes initself an object of satisfaction. On the other hand, that which excites us, with-out any reasoning about it, but in mere apprehension of it, [sic] the feeling ofthe sublime may appear, as regards its form, to violate the purpose in respect ofthe judgment, to be unsuited to our presentative faculty, and as it were to doviolence to the imagination . . . . (Kant, 1951, p. 83)

The sublime is a negative pleasure for two reasons. First, the sublime experience is a neg-ative pleasure because it represents a failed telos. The natural function or purposivenessthat the mind attributes to objects of nature (usually the intuition of a sort of entelechyor natural end) cannot be attributed to the sublime object. Second, however terrifyingor threatening the sublime object may seem, we nevertheless find our experience of itenjoyable. In the end, Kant terms this pleasure "respect" (see Kant, 1951,96-99).

Although both Kant and Burke offer numerous examples of the sublime experi-ence, the most visceral description of the sublime experience we have encounteredcomes from Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror (1982), in which the experience of our con-fronting corpses (and in turn, death) is described as one of "abjection." Kristeva's dis-cussion of the human response to death is useful, for in traditional apocalypticdiscourses death is the mark of resolution par excellence. After death, all human gooddeeds are rewarded, and all human failings are punished. By death we do not meanonly physical death, but also a psychological construct that finds itself as that ultimateconscious expression of all unconscious or semi-conscious formal termini ("ends,""conclusions," even "goals"). Kristeva illustrates how encounters with this more generalunderstanding of death not only provokes a questioning of life's "natural" end, but alsoexplains how these encounters destabilize the subject in ways Burke, Kant and Lyotardwould recognize as characteristic of the sublime. Her primary example, the experienceof dead bodies, is one that many of us may have experienced first-hand.

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For Kristeva, the experience of abjection marks our inability to master cognitivelythe experience of death. Beginning by describing the human fascination with dead bod-ies, Kristeva articulates the ways that death itself "beckons to us and ends up engulfingus" (1982, p. 4). The subject's typical response of nausea when encountering a corpse isa physiological attempt to expel the experience of death; yet Kristeva argues that we can-not expel the experience any more than we might expel our own future existence ascorpses from our presently "living" bodies. The result of such an encounter is a question-ing of the unity of our subjectivity as we are forced to consider past, present, and future(ultimately dead) selves. Kristeva suggests that the subject confronting death is shatteredwhen she attempts to master cognitively the notion of absolute absence; it is difficult tohold on to a stabilized, unified sense of self when faced with the evidence of whatremains after the threshold of death. Such abjection, for Kristeva, manifests itself in thebody as nausea and psychologically in an extremely destabilized sense of selfhood.

Kristeva's description of abjection comes closest to the kind of concrete experiencewe would like to characterize as the sublime experience. Combined with the threaten-ing element identified by Burke and its characterization as a negative pleasure by Kant,the sublime emerges as an experience that is both terrifying and pleasurable, as onethat is exhilarating despite our being unable to identify its horizon. As an experiencethat threatens any unified or centered understanding of subjectivity, we find that thesublime speaks to the subject position implicated in immanent apocalyptics. Moreover,the sublime also incorporates an immanent sense of temporality insofar as the sublimeexperience denies the sublime object—and in turn denies the subject—an ending.Hence, we propose the term "apocalyptic sublime" as an appropriate description of ourhybrid theory of postmodern apocalyptic discourse, as the term "immanent apocalyp-tic" alone cannot speak to the kind of subjectivity we find central to postmodern apoca-lyptics.

We have sketched the contours of the contemporary apocalyptic that we think isbeginning to flourish in the late twentieth century. Before we attempt to demonstratethe utility of our perspective, it is helpful to summarize our position briefly. Thus far, wehave divided apocalyptic discourse into the two categories of imminence and imma-nence. We have described the more traditional, imminent apocalyptic as consisting ofdiscourses that are marked by an end-directed or telic understanding of temporality,which in turn can be subdivided into premillennial and postmillennial types. Further,we have identified the "immanent apocalyptic" as an alternative to traditional models ofthe apocalypse. The immanent apocalyptic is similar to the traditional kind because itreveals an underlying system of order amid chaos, yet it is distinct because it denies aforeseeable resolution in favor of locating the subject within a present that is alreadythe "end time." We then discussed the mid-career work of Jean Baudrillard as an elabo-ration of the immanent apocalyptic within the postmodern context. We suggested thathis theory of implosion and the hyperreal are premised on the hollowing and ultimatecollapse of linear temporality characteristic of the immanent apocalyptic. Finally, wesuggested that the experience of the subject when located in this intense and perpetualend or state of transition is a "sublime" experience insofar as it is a threat to the per-ceived sovereignty, stability or unity of the self.

With our sketch of the apocalyptic sublime in mind, we are now prepared to discussour primary illustration. Below, we use our understanding of postmodern apocalypticto explain the discourse of "Critical Rhetoric," a theoretical approach to rhetorical crit-icism that emerged in the late 1980s at the prompting of Raymie McKerrow.

CRITICAL RHETORIC AND THE APOCALYPTIC SUBLIME

Our sketch of the postmodern apocalyptic is only worth the insight it allows us as amechanism for interpreting and explaining discourse. Rather than focus on texts that

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seem to us an obvious expression of the apocalyptic sublime (e.g., Baudrillard's latework, Japanese "anime" videos, and so on), we have chosen an illustration that is bestdescribed as a theoretical performance in our discipline: the Critical Rhetoric (CR)project begun by Raymie McKerrow in the late 1980s and refined in the early 1990s(e.g., Clark, 1996; Crowley, 1992; McGuire, 1990; Ono and Sloop, 1992). Like Madison,we believe that when a theory "gets in [our heads] and sticks—the good parts or theparts relevant to what [we] must become and do in [our] lives—performs" (1999,p. 109). Indeed, McKerrow features the performativity of criticism as a constituent"principle" of the project of CR himself (1989, p. 108). Although it seems that theproject for CR has slowed in momentum (at least in terms of McKerrow's initial vision),it continues to perform a function in the evolution of rhetorical studies. Clearly, CR wasdoing—and continues to do—something for rhetorical scholars.

Admittedly, we were initially perplexed when we were first introduced to McKer-row's ground breaking essay, "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis" (1989), because ofits attempt to bring together what we understand as contradictory French, American,and German theoretical strains (for instance, Althusserian "subjectivity" vis-a-vis theFiske-ian "polysemy" of media texts). Although the theory molded by McKerrow andweaved through a series of dense, theory-laden texts does not announce itself as anapocalyptic discourse, we find that our understanding of the apocalyptic sublime is ahelpful way to reconcile the tensions in CR theory, as well as the anxieties revealed in its"praxis." Moreover, despite the value and importance of the syncretistic observationsMcKerrow makes in the 1989 text and later works, we have yet to locate a strong pieceof rhetorical criticism that centers itself under the banner of "Critical Rhetoric"—thatis, we have yet to see a CR brand of praxis emerge in disciplinary performance. Thus,we are concerned with articulating what McKerrow's brainchild was doing in and forthe discipline of rhetorical studies.

Because CR attempts to synthesize so many disparate theoretical elements, andbecause it has yet to become a paradigm for the conduct of rhetorical criticism, we findit useful to treat McKerrow's vision as a disciplinary discourse grappling with someissues that it cannot itself contain. More specifically, we argue that the project for a CRcan be read profitably as apocalyptic insofar as it promises to reveal an underlying andpreviously hidden order amid the now readily acknowledged crisis in the humanities—the decline of academic security during the restructuring of the American university inthe service of corporate interests. Further, we argue that the project for a CR is a dis-course of the apocalyptic sublime because among the key features of its theoreticalarmature is a strident advocacy of non-telic temporality and a heavy emphasis on decen-tered subjectivity. To this end, then, we offer a reading of CR as an apocalyptic text that:(a) arises out of a sense of crisis or perceived chaos, (b) reveals a Foucauldian system oforder, and in turn, forwards a non-telic sense of temporality, and (c) emphasizes theinstability of the subject within a postmodern landscape. Such a reading allows us toillustrate the interworkings of the apocalyptic sublime on a truly challenging discourse,as well as reckon with the performance of theory in a mode of reflexivity.

Academic Crisis and the Turn to Theory

McKerrow's project for a Critical Rhetoric concerns the perpetual, self-reflexiveanalysis of discourses that, through critical intervention, disclose the "dimensions ofdomination and freedom" that must inevitably arise in a "relativized world" (1989,p. 91). McKerrow announces that this kind of analysis is "premised on Michel Fou-cault's treatment of power relations," and that the goal or telos of such analysis is thedemystification of discourses of power and the apportioning of political agency for thecritic. Because all rhetorical critics are implicated in structures of domination, however,rhetorical criticism must be a project of "permanent criticism—a self-reflexive critique

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that turns back on itself even as it promotes a realignment in the forces of power thatconstruct social relations" (1989, p. 91). Underneath this broad frame, McKerrowforges a praxis based on the implicit conventions of rhetorical criticism that precededhis entry into the discipline, and on the theoretical insights contained in cultural stud-ies and critical theory (e.g., figures from Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault to The-odor Adorno and Jurgen Habermas). Although we closely identify CR with RaymieMcKerrow, the anthology entitled The Critical Turn: Rhetoric and Philosophy in PostmodernDiscourse (1993) and the careful work of Calvin O. Schrag in Communicative Praxis andthe Space of Subjectivity (1986) during the same period are symptomatic of a larger turnin rhetorical studies in the 1980s and early 1990s. This critical turn marks yet anotheragitation in the disciplined fabric of rhetorical studies that has been twisting and turn-ing in theoretical cleansing since Robert L. Scott (1967) launched the discussion of"rhetoric as epistemic."

This CR agitation was born in part as a response to the shifts in university adminis-tration that occurred after the economic downturns of the 1970s and early 1980s. Asthe nation's economy restructured under the deregulatory conditions initiated by theReagan administration, multinational corporations began to supplant democraticallyelected governments as the dominant players on the world stage and in the educationalarena. Today in the American academy, it is common knowledge that a central part ofthe curriculum concerns the negotiation of continual institutional pressures thatthreaten to subordinate "higher education to the needs of capital" (Aronowitz, 1998,par. 4). However, during the time Raymie McKerrow was elaborating his project for acritical rhetoric, academics in the United States had not quite accepted the inevitabilityof the corporatization of education—they were still immersed in what Wlad Godzichcharacterizes as a confusing and quarrelsome decade in American academic culture.

In The Culture of Literacy (1994), Godzich locates the manifestations of this academictransformation in two curricular shifts: First, there was an increasing emphasis on pro-fessional and skill-based courses; and second, there emerged an obsession with conti-nental philosophy and theory in the humanities. Godzich argues that the mostcommon and visible response in academe to the needs of industry was the first shift, ashift that many American college and university administrators called the "New Voca-tionalism." More specifically, the "New Vocationalism" denotes the curricular changesthat occurred in response both to the recession of the 1970s and to what was seen as awidespread crisis of literacy that threatened to weaken American competitiveness in theworld economy (1994, p. 1). University admissions nation-wide opened to a broaderspectrum of students seeking vocational educations, while faculty directing servicecourses were quickly retooling their curriculum to meet the demands of students seek-ing "practical skills" to help them find jobs. Godzich argues that the increase in voca-tionally-oriented service courses is a hallmark of the New Vocationalism,4 and wouldagree that the proliferation of communication programs and departments within theconfines of business schools is a part of this trend. Almost ten years ago, Michael Cro-nin and Phillip Glenn noted that there was a widespread call on the behalf of "businessand education leaders" for "oral communication across the curriculum" programs,because "college graduates to do not possess adequate written and oral communicationskills" to succeed in—they imply—the working world (1991, par. 2). The New Vocation-alism has certainly accommodated these calls for communication competence—some-times by state mandate and accreditation—and is most directly evidenced by the"thriving and growing" basic communication course offered by most communicationdepartments (see Morreale, Hanna, Berko, & Gibson, 1999). It is not by accident that,since 1980, the basic course has and continues to be dominated by public speaking(Morreale et al., 1999, p. 14; Wardrope, 1999).

Godzich argues that the prevalence and visibility of the New Vocationalism in theAmerican university, however, masked an equally dramatic, second shift in our humani-

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ties classrooms and journals—the turn to theory. Researchers in literature and in Rhe-torical Studies programs began to abandon the "modernist" paradigms that drovemuch of their research (e.g., "New Criticism," formal analysis) in favor of new criticalparadigms, as the ground of academe shifted to accommodate the New Vocationalism.In our discipline, rhetorical scholars sought the theoretical currency of figures like Fou-cault and Derrida. (The rapid appropriation of "continental" thought is also markedconcretely by the broad, interdisciplinary readership of the "Theory and History of Lit-erature" series begun at the University of Minnesota in the 1980s, which made thinkerssuch as Lyotard, Adorno, Bataille, and so on widely available.)

Godzich's criticism of both shifts is sharp and negative. He argues that both NewVocationalism and the turn toward continental theory were too reactive and failed tofully theorize these changes on a broader, metadisciplinary level. He criticizes the voca-tional trend, which in his eyes "has sought to accommodate, or even further, the emer-gence of the posthistorical state" actualized by global capitalism. He criticizes the turntoward continental dieory for its ineptitude in its resistance to the globalization of capi-talism: "dieory has sought to oppose this emergence, frequently as blindly as literacy onits side of the divide" (1994, p. 14).

Although we disagree with some of Godzich's evaluations of these shifts in the acad-emy, we do find McKerrow's project for a CR implicated in this move toward theory thatGodzich claims is symptomatic of the academic climate of the 1980s. In the first article,"Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis" (1989), McKerrow announces that the exigenceof his project is twofold: (a) The need to overcome the "trivializing," "universalistapproaches" to meeting the challenge of Plato's critique of rhetoric and to rightlyreclaim the "status of centrality in the analysis of a discourse of power" (pp. 91-92); and(b) the need to incorporate the "critical spirit" of the "divergent perspectives ofHorkheimer, Adorno, Habermas and Foucault," among others, into rhetorical studies(p. 92). The former rationale speaks to the inferiority complex that has plagued thephilosopher trapped in the confines of the critical enterprise of rhetorical studies forsome time; the latter, however, clearly places a project for a CR within the generalizedmove to appropriate theory into the critical performance. In later essays, McKerrowadds Bourdieu, Balibar, and others to the stew of critical theories that he attempts tosynthesize.

Our contextualization of McKerrow's CR would not be complete, however, withoutacknowledging the crisis McKerrow suggests CR is addressing. As we understand it,McKerrow announces that CR enters the disciplinary dialogue at the crossroads of a dif-ferent sort of academic crisis: Either we change the theoretical basis of criticism andembrace the contingent, doxastic nature of reality, or we continue with die delusionalmodernist projects that are complicit in the hegemony of discourses of domination andoppression. As we argue below, McKerrow's response to these crises—whether it is tothe corporatization of the Academy or to the disciplinary crisis McKerrow diagnoses —is undeniably apocalyptic in its tone. Below we trace this apocalyptic tone through McK-errow's implicit and explicit theories of temporality and of subjectivity.

Temporality and The Revealed Systems of Order

So far we have suggested that McKerrow's project for a Critical Rhetoric emerges inresponse to two kinds of crises: (a) the disorienting effects of the corporatization of theAmerican university in the 1980s, and (b) an ethical or political disciplinary crisisreflected in McKerrow's writing. Both sorts of crises, one material and the other theo-retical, mark CR as a reactive discourse or disciplinary performance. As we noted ear-lier in our review of Brummett's apocalyptic model, apocalyptic discourse is usuallyreactive in nature, and aims toward the discovery or revelation of previously hidden orundisclosed systems of order amid chaos.5 Having argued that CR is in some sense a

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response to two kinds of crises, we should then be able to discern CR as a gesture of rev-elation, as the textual disclosure of previously hidden systems of order. Further, to becharacteristically immanent, the system revealed should operate on a non-telic or non-linear conceptualization of history. We believe that McKerrow's writings on CR do both:First, the revealed system of order is a Foucauldian structuralism that characterizes real-ity as the interplay between and among various discourses of power. Second, as Onoand Sloop have observed (1992), the praxis described by McKerrow forecloses resolu-tion in its solipsistic and never ending deferral of even a contingent goal for criticism.We think the former is obvious, insofar as McKerrow extends Foucault's understandingof the "orders of discourse." For instance, in elaborating on the "critique of domina-tion" element of a project for a CR, McKerrow writes:

Domination occurs through "the construction and maintenance of a particularorder of discourse . . . [and] the deployment of non-discursive affirmations andsanctions" (from Therborn, 1980, p. 82). The ruling class is affirmed byrecourse to rituals wherein its power is expressed. . . . The social structures ofdiscourse, taking their cue from Michel Foucault's "orders of discourse," beginwith "restrictions on who may speak, how much may be said, what may be talkedabout, and on what occasion" (Therborn, 1980, p. 83). These restrictions aremore than socially derived regulators of discourse; they are institutionalizedrules accepted and used by the dominant class to control the discursive actionsof the dominated. (1989, p. 93)

Clearly, McKerrow is in the process of revealing a seemingly invisible system of order.The more interesting element of this revealed order, and the element that affords

CR its postmodern, immanently apocalyptic status, is its rejection of traditional telicconceptualizations of temporality in favor of a more self-consciously posthistorical per-spective on reality and critical praxis. As we mentioned earlier, McKerrow is quite vocalabout his work sharing in "the same critical spirit that is held in common among . . .Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas, and Foucault" (1989, p. 92). There is, however, a dis-tinction to be made that highlights the apocalyptic features of CR: Unlike these figures,McKerrow seeks to locate his project firmly within a particular postmodern world thatdenies the possibility of even a contingent critical terminus (see Ono & Sloop, 1992).Indeed, McKerrow's own statement of purpose underscores the impossibility of a reso-lution grounded in the kind critical telos necessary to sustain any critical enterprise(Ono & Sloop, 1992, pp. 58-59).

In response to critics, McKerrow recasts the task of the first essay as "setting forth,not a prescriptive, rule-bound method, but an attitude or orientation toward objects ofinquiry" (1991, p. 75). Ideally, the notion of "orientation" or "attitude" serves McKer-row as a middle ground between a modernist prescriptivism and what he anticipateswill be the charge of anarchism: "Embracing a set of principles does not commit one toprescriptivism any more than it renders the critical act directionless" (1989, p. 102).What McKerrow would like to forward is "the least restrictive state from which any criti-cal act might be launched; [this state] maximizes the possibilities of what will 'count' asevidence for critical judgment, and allows for creativity in the assessment of the 'effectsof truth' upon social practices" (1989, p. 102). What is key here is the redefinition ofjudgment, for what McKerrow recognizes as "critical judgment" is a far cry from whatTheodor Adorno or Kenneth Burke would recognize as critical judgment: the exerciseof making a decision about, and a valuation of, the object of investigation, however con-tingent or prone to change that decision or evaluation may be. Instead, what McKerrowseems to forward is the continuous deferral of critical judgment in favor of the perpet-ual production of critical descriptions; such an orientation is preferable because the"results [of criticism] are never satisfying because the new social relations whichemerge from a reaction to a critique are themselves simply new forms of power and

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hence subject to renewed skepticism" (1989, p. 96). Hence, the work of the criticalrhetorician is defined in terms of a deferred critical judgment.

The postponement of critical judgment is the very same kind of commitment to"transition" or dwelling in end-states characteristic of immanent understandings oftemporality. Because a progression to ends is assumed to be impossible in a world ofever changing and ever shifting social relations within and among discourses of power,critics are unable to find footing in value-laden characterizations of a rhetorical dis-course; they are always already implicated in these larger discursive structures. Thistrend is easy to notice in the examples that McKerrow provides as sites of critical inter-vention. For instance, in analyzing the moral discourse of men such as the ReverendJimmy Swaggart, the goal of the critical rhetorician is to "call attention" to die mythsthat efface the incompatibilities between the morality spoken and the morality lived(1989, pp. 106-107). "Calling attention" is a critical position alien to much traditionalrhetorical criticism, because rhetorical critics of the older paradigm would never simply"call attention" to, for instance, the ideological underpinnings of the Lincoln-Douglasdebates.

Our point here is not to critique McKerrow's theorizing, for we, too, find muchvalue in the perspective that McKerrow offers. Rather, our point is to highlight how onemight conceptualize CR as a postmodern apocalyptic gesture that forwards a non-telicanswer to social, economic, and (in this case) academic crises. We find in McKerrow'stheorizing both a response to the chaotic interplay of discourses of domination andoppression implicit in postmodern (e.g., Lyotard) and poststructural theory (e.g., Fou-cault), as well as a response to the changing structure of the academy in the 1980s.Regarding the latter, in-step with Godzich's contextualization of the era in which McK-errow proposed the CR project, we understand CR's advocacy of permanent, reflexivecriticism as a sign of the uncertain position that the turn to theory has in resisting socialchange. As traditional grounds for academic critique were being undermined by theNew Vocationalism and by the changing global economy, rhetorical scholars were mov-ing into the kinds of theorizing CR represents. In this contextual light, it is understand-able why McKerrow's first set of critics accused him of solipsism, relativism, orconfusion, for as McKerrow (1991) rightly notes, "the logical result of continual cri-tique implies the absence of a permanent stance" (p. 76). Grappling with a CR, rhetori-cal critics found themselves, institutionally, politically, and theoretically denied theground on which to take a permanent stance.

In sum, framing McKerrow's CR theory within the apocalyptic sublime reveals thatthe state of permanent, reflexive criticism—McKerrow and others' objections to thecontrary—offers no telos, contingent or otherwise. Rather, it seems to condone theevaporation of resolution within the immanent apocalyptic. We have yet to discuss,however, how CR evinces the final element of the apocalyptic sublime—the advocacy ofa fragmented or destabilized subjectivity. As we illustrate below, the theorization of sub-jectivity is featured as a primary element within a project for a CR, and the subject theretheorized is remarkably consonant with that predicted by our model.

Perpetual Destabilization of the Subject

In the lesser known elaboration of the project for a CR, "Critical Rhetoric and thePossibility of the Subject" (1993), McKerrow places the exploration of the concept ofsubjectivity in the center of his theory. McKerrow implies that the project of a CR artic-ulated in the first article (1989) presented him with quite a challenge: Somehow, theself-centered discourse of traditional rhetorical theory and the postmodern notions ofthe displaced subject must be reconciled; prima facie, it would seem that forsaking oneor the other entailed lopping off either half of the term "critical rhetoric." McKerrowlooks to writings on performance (Conquergood, 1991; Martin, 1990) and other writ-

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ings on subjectivity in communication studies (Schrag, 1986) and locates a solution inthe possibility of the "body" acting autonomously of the mind.

In the 1993 elaboration of CR, McKerrow finds much hope in Randy Martin's claimthat "the actions of the body can take on a life of their own" (p. 54). McKerrow does notfollow this position to any of its furthest possible implications (implications we findpotentially quite troubling); rather, McKerrow argues that the possibility of the auton-omy of the body opens the project for a CR to a subjectivity that is not scripted by largersocial discourses. The work in performance studies on the body becomes the back doorthrough which McKerrow reintroduces the possibility of some measure of agency forsubjects constituted by the never ending interplay of discourses of domination and free-dom. In a move designed to appeal to readers unwilling to give up a reliance on a cen-tered human agency, McKerrow mines the late work of Foucault and weds hisdiscoveries to the notion of a performative body in order to create a semi-autonomoussubject.

Even given the possibility of a bodily agency unmoved by powerful social discourses,McKerrow stresses that notions of the subject (which, at times, seems synonymous withthe "mind") as inner-directed should be avoided. McKerrow suggests that the subject,acting in "a matrix of social practices," does not possess characteristics but rather is con-stituted of 'its characteristics. Phrased another way, within the paradigm of critical rheto-ric, it is no longer possible to consider the subject as most people do—as a singular"self with some internal core that, in turn, is responsible for most of its characteristics.Instead, McKerrow suggests we should think about subjects as constituted from without,"not [as] a substance but [as] a form" (1993, p. 60). He elaborates:

The subject takes on the form of madness or rationality, or some other form; itpresents a face to the world as active or passive, as political or thoroughly sub-jected. The subject, as actor, is not the center of all experience and change;rather, it is constituted as one facet of the possibilities of change within socialrelationships. (1993, p. 60).

In some sense, McKerrow's language here speaks the language of traditional subjectiv-ity: "active," "passive," and "possibility of change," connote the agency of an "individ-ual." But at the middle of his analysis is a subject emptied of its content and pushed offits "center" in the world. Under the influence of a ubiquitous postmodernism, McKer-row sacrifices our traditional or naive realist reliance on the individual or "self andreplaces it with the discursive mold that produced such a naive reliance.

McKerrow intends this theorizing of subjectivity to be generalizable. That is, McKer-row intends this to be his own contribution to the theoretical articulation of subjectivityin the postmodern age. As such, it is obviously consonant with the description of subjec-tivity we have presented with the help of Kristeva, Burke, Kant, and Lyotard. The sub-ject has been destabilized as "one facet of the possibilities of change" (McKerrow, 1993,p. 60). This emptied subjectivity, in turn, strictly limits the critical act within the sublimeexperience of the immanent apocalyptic. For the critic, faced with both the deferral ofcritical judgment that is characteristic of the CR project and the resultant loss of the sta-ble subject, the goal for CR is reduced to a celebration of McGee's "fragmentation the-sis," a sublime party at which the "critic's role is to represent texts from a collection offragmentary episodes.. . . [thereby] inventing a text suitable for criticism" (McKerrow,1993, p. 62). The destabilized subject position of the critic can only produce equallyunstable texts, which she can only engage in the most limited of critical judgments. Asthe position of the subject within CR is expanded to include that of the critic, a kind ofcritical paralysis seems to emerge: We are left wide-eyed and drooling in sight of themagnitude of the social matrix and complex machinations of the discourses of freedomand domination that constitutes and reconstitutes us in never ending interplays ofpower.

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For the above mentioned reasons, the Critical Rhetoric project is at least as valu-able as a record of disciplinary history as it is a critical paradigm. In the (tentative) end,rhetorical criticism has recovered from some of the crises diagnosed by Godzich andMcKerrow less by following the path CR cleared than by deferring to CR's theoreticalvalue and refining and continuing down the paths previously trodden. Hence, as a theo-retical disciplinary performance, as a response to institutional crises in the academy andto perceived postmodern crises in theory, as a revealed underlying system of orderabsent a resolution, and as a theory that discloses and advocates the instability of subjec-tivity, we are led to conclude that McKerrow's project for a Critical Rhetoric is fruitfullydescribed as the brand of postmodern apocalyptic that we term the apocalyptic sublime.

AN ENDING

In this essay we have described the rhetorical dimensions of a subgenre of apocalyp-tic discourse that is not accommodated by current apocalyptic theory, a discourse thatwe have termed the apocalyptic sublime. The apocalyptic sublime erases teleology andsubstitutes traditional "ends" with the sublime experience; this experience attempts topostpone resolution and even perpetuates the disorientation and anomie experiencedby audiences, ultimately in order to destabilize the subject.

We recognize that we are not the first to begin an articulation of a contemporarysublime theory. Some postmodern thinkers argue, for example, that the sublime expe-rience is potentially liberating for the subject, because such experiences free the sub-ject from the oppressive logics of selfhood, identity, and representational ideology.According to these thinkers, by pitting the subject into a state of instability by removingher from the modernist foundations which defined subjectivity, she is free to contem-plate her constructedness. Much of this thinking falls under the rubric of "contempo-rary sublime theory," an area of theory that we have drawn from ourselves in order todescribe the apocalyptic sublime. Some versions of sublimity in postmodern theory,such as Lyotard's linguistic "differend" (1988, pp. 1-31) and Deleuze and Guattari'semancipated "schizoids" (1977, pp. 22-35; 1987, pp. 149-166), subscribe to the liberat-ing possibilities of the sublime experience. Although we agree that such an experienceholds the possibility of temporary emancipation, we also believe it is important to stressthat one can just as easily court the sublime for the purpose of reassembling a frag-mented subjectivity into a fascist identity.6

In selecting the project for a Critical Rhetoric as the initial object of analysis for ourmodel of the apocalyptic sublime, our goal was twofold: to demonstrate the utility ofour theory for the explication of a complicated text, and to encourage critical reflec-tion on our own academic practices. If we have enabled a reconsideration of the Criti-cal Rhetoric project or of rhetorical criticism within the historical context of the lasttwo decades, we have met a primary goal of this text. But our work in exploring contem-porary manifestations of the apocalyptic sublime should not be restricted to academicdiscourse. The denial of a sense of an ending and the destabilization of the subject iseasily observed in a number of media events. For example, that two young men fromLittleton, Colorado, could so easily end the lives of 15 others without any significantreason other than the pleasures of the experience itself marks the intersection of theapocalyptic sublime with a variety of media institutions and practices worthy of furtherexplication (see Brooke 1999). Elsewhere, we intend to show how media representa-tions of the Columbine High School massacre folds the presumed fragility of the youth-ful subject into an apocalyptic narrative that forestalls resolution. Although ColumbineHigh School has long since reopened its doors to students since the catastrophe ofspring, 1999, in media representations the bullet shells continue falling.

Nevertheless, Barry Brummett is correct to observe that the "judgment as towhether apocalyptic rhetoric in general is a 'good' or 'bad' thing" may not be appropri-

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ate (1991, p. 172), for we could just as easily argue that some apocalyptic discourseshelp to liberate audiences from outmoded world views as much as others lead audi-ences to their ultimate doom. Clearly, we will have to judge the relative merits and pit-falls of apocalyptic discourses on a case-by-case basis.

NOTES1 By "eschatology" we mean the study of ends in the broadest sense. "Apocalyptic" is a concept subsumed

by "eschatology." Although "eschatology" specifically refers to that branch of theology concerned with thestudy of ends, we do not wish to limit the term to its traditionally Christian connotation.

2 Kermode grounds these claims in the thoroughly modernist philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, who Ker-mode notes was among the first to herald this collapse, as well as in the existential theology of Rudolph Bult-mann (e.g., Kermode, 1977, p. 9).

3 Making sense of Baudrillard's understanding of history requires a familiarity with his previous work (aswell as Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," 1968), for he offers up history as a simula-tion that is "imploding" on itself, folding backward as humankind hurriedly attempts to rewrite it in a way thatwill "rid us of the sedimentation of centuries of stupidity." Amal Banerjee suggests that Baudrillard has inmind an untranslated German essay by Karl Lowith entitled "Universal History and Salvation" (1950, pp. 106-153), in which Lowith is said to have observed that "we are accustomed to view history as a linear successionof hope and progress" because of a long Western tradition of "Judaic messianism and Christian eschatology"(Banerjee, 1993, par. 3).

4 Godzich analyzes this shift in terms of a rapidly changing notion of literacy, one which is intimatelybound with the expansion of global capitalism. He argues that contemporary literate culture is based onmediated as opposed to direct experience, and as such it holds the potential for a gain in efficiency in thetraining of laborers through mediated instruction (print texts, videos, online media) rather than throughdirect experience of labor (1994, p. 10).

5 In an extremely broad sense, the academy itself is arguably an apocalyptic machine insofar as it strivestoward the elaboration and discovery of previously unknown systems of order, and in turn, the transmissionof these systems for the ultimate goal of stability—read as either profit, hegemony, or liberation, dependingon one's perspective.

6 We understand that this threat is precisely what Lyotard's "differend" is supposed to address: "The differ-end is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put intophrases yet cannot be. … A lot of searching must be done to find new rules for forming and linking phrasesthat are able to express the difference disclosed by the feeling [of the sublime], unless one wants this differ-end to be smothered right away in the litigation and for the alarm sounded by the feeling to have been use-less. What is at stake in literature, in a philosophy, in a politics, perhaps, is to bear witness to differends byfinding idioms for them" (1988, p. 13). Lyotard's project is to hasten emancipation through sublimity whileallowing for its expression in a continual interplay of special idioms (differends) in order to both preservecultural difference (as conflict among individuals is unavoidable) and forestall fascism.

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On the apocalyptic sublime