Invective Form in Popular Media Culture: Genre – Mode – Affordance

For quite some time now, the concept of mode has been a go-to fix for moments when formal criticism runs into the limitations of genre. It is particularly in moments where scholars aim to theorize forms across historical periods or media that the concept of genre often becomes too rigid. This is the case, for example, when Griffin seeks to conceptualize satire across the centuries of its use.

See especially Münkler in this issue.

Yet not only a form like satire, that shares the diversity and dynamism of invective, poses such problems, also a seemingly more narrow and specific literary form like the picaresque does. When Wicks theorizes the picaresque as it manifests itself from 17th-century Spanish narratives to the 20th-century novel, he also finds that the concept of genre does not work:

The search for a picaresque genre concept has fluctuated between two extremes, which ultimately cancel themselves out: a rigidly historical approach that seeks a genre so pure that no two texts together can verify it, and an ahistorical approach that posits a genre concept so inclusive that its many texts in their diversity invalidate it.

Wicks (1989) Picaresque, p. 36f.

His solution, too, is to conceptualize the picaresque as a mode which features “in widely varying degrees in much fiction that could not by even the most generous generic measure be considered picaresque fictions proper.”

Wicks (1989) Picaresque, p. 43.

In their details, the modal concepts that Griffin and Wicks use are not fully congruous – in fact, it often seems that mode can operate as a solution to problems of genre criticism precisely because it is a somewhat suggestive category, capable of mobilizing thinking thanks to a productive openness

Because the term ‘mode’ is so suggestively open, it has been employed and theorized in several contexts. Next to its development in the context of genre criticism, with which I am concerned here, one notable other example would be the concept of ‘narrative modes’ that is used in narratology.

Thus approaching mode as a practice makes it a very open, perhaps unproductively vague concept. To get a better fix on its conceptual boundaries, several scholars have considered a relationship between modes and genres. Fowler, who has developed one of the most comprehensive theorizations of literary types in Anglo-American studies, argues that modes are closely related to genres, or “kinds”, as he calls them. For him, kinds are historically situated genres that distinguish themselves by particular properties – a “generic repertoire”

Fowler (1982) Kinds, p. 55.

If one follows Fowler’s ideas to think the invective in popular culture as a mode, this immediately raises the question what might be the parent genre of such an invective mode. This is a challenging question – and its challenges, in fact, echo the problems that Fowler himself has when identifying a singular generic ‘source’ for some of the modes he discusses.

For Fowler (1982) Kinds, the most challenging mode is, again, the satiric: “Satire is the most problematic mode to the taxonomist, since it appears never to have corresponded to any one kind”, he writes, and ends up concluding: “Diversity of form is paradoxically the ‘fixed’ form of satire” (p. 110).

Reconceiving Fowler’s ideas in this way slightly shifts the question, to the effect of asking what might have been early genre formations in which the invective mode took solid shape and evolved its modal repertoire. I want to point to two particularly influential formations within English-language traditions – which, incidentally, overlap to an extent that seems to stand testimony to the existence of a connecting, possibly prior, modal impulse. One is a form known as ‘flyting,’ a practice of stylized invective contest that circulated across some of the earliest canonical English texts, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and several of Shakespeare’s plays, and that became tightly conventionalized in 15th- and 16th-century Scottish poetry.

See, e.g., Hendricks (2012) Battle, especially pp. 71–74 and p. 90f.

The other genre I want to point out is satire, with its robust and lively tradition in the English-language imagination, which also informs so much of contemporary popular culture. Of course, it would be more accurate to speak of several generic formations here, since the satiric, as already noted, has tied itself to several external forms, also in the foundational periods of Anglophone literary history, ranging, if you will, from John Dryden’s poetry to Jonathan Swift’s prose. Satire is one of the literary formations that Northrop Frye discusses in his seminal Anatomy of Criticism, and interestingly, he delineates it by talking about its boundaries to neighboring formations, including that of flyting (which he treats as synonymous with ‘invective’). He points to two properties that supposedly distinguish satire, and his phrasing indicates that they mark highly porous boundaries. One is the moral motivation that ostensibly drives invective attacks in satire – the conviction that the people, human behaviors, or social formations that are disparaged are wrong, and that attacking them serves a greater good. Frye aptly depicts this as a claim that satiric materials make, a textual performance that might be as fictional as other moments in the materials,

Frye himself uses the satiric technique of mockery to make this point, singling out the English writer Alexander Pope as his target: “The satirist commonly takes the high moral line. Pope asserts that he is ‘To Virtue only and her friends a friend,’ suggesting this is what he is really being when he is reflecting on the cleanliness of the underwear worn by a lady who had jilted him” (Frye [1957] Anatomy, p. 225).

So I suggest that, in English-language imaginary traditions, flyting and forms of satire are two early and influential genre formations in which the invective mode evolved its modal repertoire. This repertoire revolves around a poetics of devaluation, negotiating a hierarchy between a speaker (speaking directly or indirectly, through figural or authorial voices) and an addressee (addressed directly or by proxy). The repertoire can suture the audience into the textual world in different places, often – through not always – working to make them side with the invective agency. This is a highly volatile operation, whose volatility a purely modal concept cannot fully explain. I will come back to this. When it comes to formal techniques, the repertoire of the invective mode is very broad and constantly evolving. This breadth and dynamism is tied to the diversity of formal techniques in the genre formations in which the invective mode has developed its repertoire. It is additionally tied to the premium that these genres have placed on inventiveness and creativity in invective expression. Finally, I would note that the invective mode regularly cohabits with other modes, especially when it is realized in (larger) narrative forms: Narrative, thanks to the requirements of emplotment, rarely can do with a poetics of devaluation alone.

Let me take a moment to illustrate this with the example of Duck Dynasty. The show is shaped by the conventions of a reality tv-subgenre typically called family reality shows: depictions of a family’s everyday life that claim to be factual (though they are, of course, highly stylized and formulaic). Most family reality shows focus on celebrities, with the dual promise of offering tabloid-like insights into the private lives of media stars, and of disclosing the eccentricities, if not pathologies, that lie hidden underneath the glamor.

E.g. The Osbournes (2002-2005), Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica (2003–2005), Run’s House (2005–2009), and, of course, Keeping up with the Kardashians (2007–present). See Andrejvic (2004) Reality TV, pp. 10–12.

In Duck Dynasty – as in other shows of this genre – the invective mode manifests itself, for one, in how the protagonists are portrayed. The poetics of devaluation that animate this portrayal particularly surface in how the show takes recourse to an established derogatory stereotype – that of the ‘redneck’. ‘Redneck’ is an (originally) disparaging epithet for poor white people from the rural South, figuring them as “God-fearing, gun-toting, truck-driving, inbred bumpkin[s],”

As Huber (1995) outlines, the stereotype of the ‘redneck’ has been refigured several times throughout the history of its use. Especially in recent years, it has been used for the valorization of (Southern) whiteness.

Finally, the show clearly does not rely on an invective mode alone. One other modal touchstone I want to mention is the sentimental mode, on which the show especially draws in its staging of the Robertsons’ ‘family values’ – in how it glorifies the Robertson family as an ideal space of mutual affection and functioning sociability.

Dobson (1997) influentially defined the sentimental as an “emotional and philosophical ethos that celebrates human connection, both personal and communal” (p. 266), adding: “[s]entimentalism envisions the self-in-relation; family [...], intimacy, community, and social responsibility are its primary relational modes” (p. 267). And I am consciously using the phrase ‘family values’ here to designate the set of ideas, invoked especially in conservative U.S. politics, that “the nuclear family, with a married heterosexual couple and their children, is the foundation of a solid and healthy democracy” (May [2003] Family Values, p. 7).

As outlined so far, a modal approach can be useful for conceptualizing the invective moments in a format like Duck Dynasty, and for placing the show and its genre within larger contexts of invectively flavored popular culture. But there are aspects of Duck Dynasty’s invectivity that the modal approach cannot account for. Most notably, it cannot account for the volatility and dynamism of the show’s invective operations. For one, the show’s use of the ‘redneck’ stereotype has triggered amply documented readings as empowering those it allegedly belittles.

Duck Dynasty’s substantial fan following bears testimony to such reading practices, as does the extensive merchandise that is marketed for the show.

The interview provoked responses that were highly confrontational in themselves: While some commentators maintained that the interview makes explicit a white supremacist stance that is implicit in the show itself, others validated it as an accurate depiction of life in the South, charging the other camp of commentators with offending white Southerners like Robertson by trying to silence them. So, apparently, devaluation is not a fixed and stable property of Duck Dynasty’s various textual moves, but a quality that is subject of intense negotiation. Is there a way to integrate this into a model of invective form?

I want to suggest that amending a modal approach to pop-cultural invective with the concept of affordance can help address these questions. Levine adapted the term ‘affordance’ from design theory in order to reconceive (not only, but also) literary form. In design theory, she notes, „[a]ffordance is a term used to describe potential uses and actions latent in materials and designs.“

Levine (2015) Forms, p. 6.

Levine now suggests that literary – or, more broadly, communicative – forms

Actually, Levine (2015) Forms, is interested in a much more broadly conceived notion of form that encompasses any “arrangement of elements – [any] ordering, patterning, or shaping” (p. 3), be it aesthetic or social.

A promising point where this formalist notion of affordance could be brought into conversation with the concept of an invective mode is the idea of a modal repertoire – i.e., of the openended repertoire of forms and means on which the invective mode draws. Taking my cue from Levine, I want to propose that one way to delineate the elements in this modal repertoire would be to say that they afford the devaluation and symbolic injury of subjects. Conceiving of this invective valence as an affordance means to conceptualize it not as a fixed and stable property of elements in the invective mode’s repertoire, but as a latent potential that can (or cannot) be realized in its individual uses. At the same time, it means to acknowledge that the elements of this modal repertoire have other affordances, which can be realized in tandem with or alternative to each other. For example, the insignia of the image of the ‘redneck’ that Duck Dynasty operates can be used to signify shame, but they also afford the expression of pride. For the media commodity that the show is, performances that are drenched in offensive stereotypes afford the accrual of attention. And, to point to another element in the invective’s modal repertoire, epithets – like the word ‘yuppie’ that is framed as an epithet in the show’s storyworld – afford the expression of disdain (when directed at subjects outside the protagonists’ community, demarcating this community’s boundaries in the process), but they also afford playful expressions of affection and intimacy within that community. Even the most conventionalized means of invective communication are not just invective; nor are they invective all the time, nor to everybody.

Conceiving disparagement as an affordance opens up several interesting questions for a new-formalist inquiry into invective popular culture. For one, it directs attention to the kinds of affordances that accumulate in the invective’s modal repertoire – convergences like the ones I just exemplified (potentials to express shame – pride; injury – attention; disdain – affection). Are such convergences the result of local realizations of the invective mode, or are they systematic phenomena that inhere in (potentially invective) signifiers? Are there expressive affordances that are intrinsically related? And how exactly are the different affordances and their realizations interlaced in the material and in the media practices around it? Do they inform, inflect, or compete with each other? Are there any intersectional effects that can be observed?

In addition, the concept of affordance brings into focus the extent to which invective repertoires address themselves to particular subject positions. In fact, the relationship between invective affordances and the subjects who realize them is so strong that such practices can be argued to performatively bring these subject positions into being. In this sense, affordances configure subject positions. For example, the label ‘yuppie’ has invective affordances only for subject positions like the ones from which Duck Dynasty’s protagonists speak. At the same time, these invective affordances configure the ‘plebeian’, rural subject position which the Robertsons perform by using the label as an epithet. Similarly, the different affordances of the ‘redneck’-stereotype depend on the subject position from which the stereotype’s insignia are used. In Duck Dynasty, the position from which these insignia afford the expression of pride is both classed and gendered – the male Robertsons can use them in ways that the female members of the family cannot. The kind of lower-class masculinity that the characters perform by realizing the ‘redneck’-stereotype’s potential to express pride is, again, configured by this affordance – and it is clearly a performative accomplishment: By economic standards, the Robertsons are, of course, everything but lower class. In what Walton has aptly described as “redneck drag,”

Qtd. in O’Sullivan (2016) Playing, p. 372.

To conclude, for an interest in the invective dynamics in and of US popular culture, conceptualizing the invective as a mode and as an affordance opens up several avenues for productive inquiry. It allows to address the diversity and range of external forms by which pop-cultural invectivity operates. In addition, it brings into focus the fluidity that marks the repertoire of invective popular culture, its paradoxical tendency to gravitate toward routinization in more set conventions, only to conspicuously push against these conventions’ boundaries. Finally, to conceive of the invective valence of the mode’s repertoire not as a fixed property but as an affordance helps talk about the volatility and dynamism of invective performances in popular culture, the way in which their invective effects are contingent on the social positionality from and for which they realized, and the way in which their invective valence is open for resignification.