When our department was first formed here back in 2008, the first order of business of the newly assembled faculty was to choose a department name. After the great I.A. Richards, I suggested “The Department of Miscommunication.” Richards had suggested in his work that nobody really studies communication. When it works, he argued, it’s uninteresting. Nobody pays attention to communication when everything is going great. It is when people misunderstand and judge in weird ways that we wonder how it happened. Often times I think this is the root of rage and anger when people don’t “get the obvious.” So I thought it was a good name for us to go with. I was quickly ignored after people realized I wasn’t joking.
Now on my campus nursing is all the rage. Aside from the obvious irony of building a giant nursing facility on a university campus (home care for the aged? Is this symbolic hospice?) everyone is thinking of ways, or trying to think of ways, to wedge what they do into the new program and new flashy facilities and budget. This only makes sense. And apparently my subconcious is as well. The other day I saw something that referenced the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and misread it to say “Department of Unsuitable Sciences.” I thought, what a cool and appropriate place for a rhetoric professor! For isn’t rhetoric an unsuitable science?
Arguments from Lacan and Lundberg’s great case for thinking of rhetoric as a science, it’s really not a suitable one is it? For rhetoric eschews commitments of all kinds. Scientists will interrupt here and proclaim, “O how wrong you are about science! For a scientist is the first to throw off commitments in the light of new information!” However that is merely trading a set of commitments for another. What the rhetorician does is point out that this is wordplay. One calls a serious commitment “truth” or “data” as a scientist, and something removed from that a “commitment.” The rhetorician is always moving the goalposts and the field, sometimes in opposite directions to explore what happens if we have a goalpost and no field, and vice versa.
The Department of Unsuitable Sciences would preserve this sort of fluidity of moving around the ‘givens.’ Yes, we are practicing science; yes these sciences are unsuitable, perhaps as sciences but we open up the research into a number of different ways to determine unsuitability. We simultaneously hold up the idea that these are sciences and that they are unsuitable as such or for other reasons to be discovered through our work, which only takes place by way of propping this title up. Without it, there’s not a lot of reason to inquire after it, is there?
Unsuitability moves under its own force. Sometimes we feel the sharpness of it when we tell a joke and nobody takes it as funny, or when we make a comment that in one venue would have gotten a laugh, but in this one only creates furrows on frowning faces. This alone is worth study, and thankfully some rhetoricians define the art of rhetoric as one of the study of appropriateness. What is appropriate in one venue is not in another; we have a sense about this, but it’s hard to articulate and makes us very uncomfortable when there is the demand to articulate the reasons why something cannot be said in a particular location in space-time, around particular people.
Perhaps the Gen Z term would be “Department of Cringe Studies.” I think that this might be what we are after in serious rhetoric – the avoidance and appearance of the Cringe. For that is a serious, embodied reaction, hard to articulate that is often brought about by the appearance of combinations of words. Symbols misunderstood and misused are at the heart of cringe as well. The Department of Unsuitable Sciences is open to any and all research into cringe content.
Perhaps the Department of Unsuitable Sciences is a good podcast title? I have been thinking about a new solo venture in this medium, so why not? If it’s unsuitable for podcasting then it would be a perfect fit.
