Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America - Dave Tell Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation

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the genre's recurrent textual features. The works of Bauer and Foucault are again instructive and representative. Their work demonstrates just how thoroughly confessional inquiry has internalized the mistaken assumption that if we are to understand the politics of confession, we must first isolate the textual features that constitute a true confession. In virtually every study, in other words, a confession does what it does because it is what it is.

      Consider again the work of Susan Wise Bauer. She argues that in twentieth-century America, “the public confession came to serve a very particular purpose. It became a ceremonial laying down of power, made so that followers could pick that power up and hand it back.” After defining confession in these terms, the remainder of The Art of the Public Grovel evaluates how particular leaders used or misused the public confession in order to regain power: Ted Kennedy failed at Chappaquiddick, Jimmy Swaggart succeeded, and President Bill Clinton gradually perfected the art. What distinguishes Kennedy from Swaggart, the early Clinton from the late? Rhetorical artistry. Kennedy, Bauer tells us, did not recover his power because he “misread his audience” and therefore rationalized his actions rather than “admitting to moral blame.” Swaggart, by contrast, responded to his scandal with a “model confession.” He never “engaged in any blameshifting,” he never excused his behavior, he offered nine “clear statements of fault” and “eight pleas for forgiveness.” Consequently, “when Swaggart laid his power down, his congregation picked it up and handed it back.”17 In sum, for Bauer the power of the confession hinges on the artistry of the confessant—the ability, as it were, to say the right things at the right time.

      Within confessional studies, the primary alternative to the instrumental tradition in which Bauer works is found in the work of Michel Foucault, who argues that the confessant makes her- or himself vulnerable to an insidious form of social control—a form of control he famously labeled disciplinary power. Just as much as Bauer, however, Foucault assumed that the power of the confession hinges on its substantive content. On two separate occasions, Foucault provided a survey of the history of the confession.18 The critical movement in each of these surveys was the gradual disengagement of confession from a judicial code of prohibitions. For a long time, Foucault explained, the substantive content of confession was determined by the illegal acts of the penitent: adultery, fornication, debauchery, and so forth. Beginning in the sixteenth century, however, the substantive content of the confession was increasingly calibrated to the thoughts rather than the actions of the penitent.19

      This is the decisive turning point in Foucault's account of confession. It is precisely when the substantive content of confession shifted from the disclosure of actions to the disclosure of thoughts that confession became a technology of social control.20 If the content of confession had never shifted from actions to thoughts, then the genre would have remained a relatively benign practice. If every confession was modeled on The Life of Benvenuto Cellini or Clinton's My Life—texts in which there is little more than a recounting of past events—Foucault's explanation of confession would be wholly irrelevant. I say this not to minimize the force of Foucault's account, but to emphasize that its force is dependent on a particular, substantive definition of confession.

      Thus, just as much as Bauer's instrumental approach, Foucault's critical approach is marked by a dependence on the substantive features of the confession. In both traditions, the political power of confession is calibrated to the textual characteristics of confessional prose. For Bauer, the capacity of a confession to recover power hinges on the avoidance of “blameshifting” and the outright admission of guilt; for Foucault, the application of power hinges on a shift from confessing actions to confessing thoughts. Neither approach to confession, however, accounts for the unmistakable power of texts that have circulated as confessions despite their textual characteristics. For example, Bauer's schema could not account for the power of the Starr Report; Foucault's logic could not account for the power of Bill Clinton's August 17 confession; and neither schema could explain the power of True Story Magazine, Look's article on Emmett Till, or The Confessions of Nat Turner—all texts that wide segments of the population called confessions. Because confessional studies writ large has followed Bauer and Foucault, tuning confessional power to textual forms, the field is still unable to explain the power of confessions that do not look like the models they posit. More pressing still, working from the influential models of Bauer and Foucault, the field is unable to explain the complicity of the genre with cultural politics. How is it that the genre of confession has intervened into such issues as sexuality, class, race, violence, religion, and democracy? In my view, these interventions have little to do with the rhetorical artistry of an individual speaker or the subtle coercions of disciplinary power. They result, rather, from the classification and circulation of texts as confessions.

      What is needed, and what Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America provides, is an account of confession's power predicated not on any particular set of textual characteristics, but rather on the simple act of claiming a text as a confession or refusing to do so: a reception history. As Steven Mailloux has argued, reception studies are a rhetorical version of cultural studies. They are rhetorical because they attend to the specific ways that texts have been interpreted and classified; they are cultural because they work from the assumption that interpretation and classification are beholden to cultural norms. Under the heading of “rhetorical hermeneutics,” Mailloux describes a reception study as follows: “Rhetorical hermeneutics is a form of cultural rhetoric study that takes as its topic specific historical acts of interpretation within their cultural contexts. It promotes a rhetorical history that embeds the act of interpretation in its most relevant critical debates (and there may be several) and locates these ongoing arguments within the rhetorical traditions of relevant institutional discourses.”21

      In Confessional Crises, I embed six historical acts of interpretation in their most relevant cultural debates: sexuality, class, race, violence, religion, and democracy. Throughout, I am at pains never to separate the always-shifting genre of confession from these wider cultural debates, through which particular understandings of confession were made relevant in particular moments. In this sense, Confessional Crises offers the first political economy of confession.22 Stressing the relationship between the boundaries of the genre and the cultural politics of an age, I argue that the reclassification, declassification, and circulation of texts as confessions has been a potent means of influencing American cultural politics.

      Confession and Authenticity

      In addition to providing a history of texts that have been reclassified and circulated as confessions, Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America provides insight into why activists have so consistently turned to confessional hermeneutics as a technique of cultural intervention. One answer stands out from the lot: the sheer power of authenticity. It has driven both the reclassification of texts as confessions and the refusal to acknowledge the confessional status of a given text. Although Peter Brooks has claimed that the confession bears a “special stamp of authenticity,” the reality is more complex.23 Confessional Crises suggests that the simple act of labeling a text as a confession can either endow a text with an aura of authenticity or divest a text of authenticity. On the one hand, from the onset of the “modern confession industry” in 1919 forward, politically motivated citizens have been turning the unlikeliest of texts into confessions simply to cash in on the political cachet of the authentic. There is perhaps no better, more concise evidence of the political power of the link between authenticity and confession than this: when Twentieth Century-Fox sought to turn William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner into a feature-length film, the Black Anti-Defamation Association insisted only that the film “must not bear the title of William Styron's book lest it lend validity to his falsification of history.”24 Fox complied.

      On the other hand, while the political cachet of confession's “special stamp of authenticity” may be lucrative, it is also fragile. To the extent a confession is compelled or coerced, it is disqualified as an authentic expression. The very fact of the Miranda rights—not to mention their prominence in American popular culture—is evidence of just how tenuous is the link between confession and authenticity. Legally speaking, if a confession is not obtained in the proper manner, if the proper rituals

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