Invasion of Privacy: The personal politics of rhetoric with Lee Pierce
*Trigger warning: Mentions of emotional abuse*
“Many people know me because I taught interpersonal communication, and one of the things I never [tell my students] is, ‘I don’t do any of this. I know it works, I can see why it’s so important, but when I go home at night and I try to do this stuff I get screamed at in my face and I stop talking. I am up here, lying to you.’”
Lee Pierce is an assistant professor of rhetoric and communication at SUNY Geneseo: a concentration and department that is not only widely studied, but renowned at the institution. While there are many faculty at Geneseo that go above and beyond in regard to their curriculum and presence in the classroom, it is rare that one encounters a professor as authentic, transparent, and committed to respect as Pierce.
Pierce’s experience at Geneseo began well before their career here, where they failed out as a student in 2001. Pierce went on to fail out of colleges on the local, state, private, and ivy league levels before earning a degree in business, enabling them to work jobs in business and hospitality that they all but despised. But even Pierce’s pre-academic life has more or less guided them towards a lifelong dedication to the study of rhetoric.
Raised in a “classic queer white middle-class” household, Pierce grew up with an alcoholic father, a codependent mother, and a brother who garnered some of the same addictions that Pierce struggled with. According to Pierce, this is where their first experiences with rhetoric took root.
“Things for me that other people really held sacred—childhood innocence, the nuclear family, the two-parent household… it just wasn’t real,” they said. “Rhetoric is a coping mechanism for me.”
To understand this metaphor, we can employ Pierce’s definition of rhetoric: “words without referent,” or words with “no root in action.” Pierce’s interpretation of this definition is the intrigue that lends itself to what will become of the rest of their career—“I don’t think there’s anything that’s not that.”
Pierce’s upbringing impacted them not only in their family’s dynamic but in their business—“I grew up in a restaurant family, so my whole life was the razzle-dazzle. My dad used to call it ‘the theater of the mind.’” Later in Pierce’s life, after earning their degree in business, this background would only emphasize their frustration as the stakes of their hospitality work raised.
“That something with so little material consequence… could have so much fantasy attached to it,” Pierce said. “Through my language, the way the table is arranged…it’s all this symbolic discourse shit, but it does have an impact on the way people think and feel and experience a moment.”
“Your whole life is just how the language you use creates the experience around you, and you have some control over it, but you don’t have total control, because all the words in the world don’t fit into alcoholic family systems.”
Pierce left the hospitality world to return for their master’s at SUNY Brockport; it was here where they found and fell in love with rhetoric.
“All of a sudden all of this stuff clicked, except now we’re talking about using all of this language and theatrics and performance to change people’s minds, to achieve social justice, that kind of shit, not to upsell a cheese and cracker platter.”
As Pierce’s passion for rhetoric took off, so did their career in academia and scholarship. As they began to teach subjects like interpersonal relations at Geneseo, Pierce found themself struggling to reconcile with such topics in their own life; more explicitly, Pierce found themself in a codependent and emotionally abusive relationship.
While Pierce’s related experiences have not necessarily found their way into much of their scholarship, there are elements that, with seething irony, intersect with their academia in every way.
“My relationships, especially romantic and familial, they don’t feel rhetorical to me. So when someone says something to me about me or about themselves that I’m in a relationship with, it feels very true and very real,” they said. “That’s important to remember because not everything is rhetoric…interpersonal relationships are very different. Your body reacts, and your chemicals react, and you’re conditioned in certain ways…I’m out of that relationship now and part of it was [that] literally someone else came in and just said, ‘I’m doing this for you, you cannot do this yourself.’ We had to get rid of language, and actually, physically they had to control me to make me do the thing that needed to be done.”
To hear a communications professor with a special concentration in rhetoric speak so bluntly about the way that communication lacks, hurts, and crumbles under pressure breaks the fourth wall of the classroom in a manner that is rarely seen on a college campus. Pierce’s commentary did not stop, however, at this scathing criticism—rather, the lessons they have gathered about lackluster language and words without referent accumulated into one staggering blow towards what they have studied their entire life.
“A lot of times, you know, speech doesn’t work. I wish it did. I really wish it did, and that I could stand up in front of you and say that, ‘If we all just figure out the right words, then power and money are going to give up and let us live happily,’ but that just isn’t true.”
In the dreary wake of Pierce’s sharp analysis, it is quintessential to contextualize that Pierce’s identity, as a person and a professor, would be contradicted entirely without a compromise to this hopelessness—a way to continue with their passion and shape it from something without action to something that can grow and change lives. Fortunately for us, they have proven able to do that not only in their scholarship but in their personal life as well.
“Six years, I never thought I could get out. But I got out, and it took two things—it took me, turning over and saying, ‘I can’t do this, please help me’... and it took realizing that words are just words. And that was probably the hardest thing for me to understand.”
This progress-based thinking is what calls Geneseo students to the communications department (and to Pierce’s classroom specifically) semester after semester—this recognition and thrusting critique of what rhetoric is, and a hope for what it can become. Both politically and personally, Pierce has done their best to shift their narrative of falling short at applying their academia to their own life, and to spread that narrative to others, as well.
“That’s where the rhetoric ultimately comes full-circle, it’s just that it's a lot harder to get there. And it’s still hard, I mean now that I’m dating again. Still, people say stuff, and I’m like ‘Oh my god, it’s true.’ But then I have to remind myself, ‘No, Lee, it’s fucking discourse. You have a PhD, you know these things, this person just said stuff, you are still entirely in control with what you make that mean…’ But it’s a hard practice. God, if human beings would just do that, like…there would be a lot of things that would be a lot fucking better, because we wouldn’t have so much of this wasted energy worrying about what other people fucking think and say about us in our interpersonal sphere, so we could worry about actual things like what people are doing to us legally and in the political sphere.”
While Pierce clarifies their working understanding of how their scholarship can and does apply to the grander global stage, they recognize the importance of its impact on a college campus as well.
“I think that it’s important that people know [about codependency], because a lot of them are struggling with this. A lot of especially women on the campus are supporting boyfriends who don’t treat them well—it’s not always a het[erosexual] thing, but it often is, it’s often women doing this for men—and they’re not living up to their potential, they’re spending all of their fucking time caregiving and emotionally fucking feeding these other people, and they’re gonna get sucked up and sucked dry.”
Akin to Pierce’s sentiment, one of the biggest pitfalls of how we utilize language in our everyday lives is by either forgetting its power, or feeling its effects too harshly; language can help us escape what feels inescapable, or it can be the tool that makes us feel trapped forever. The strength it takes to overpower this cycle, to rip oneself out of it, to study the way these structures work and to focus on them in a way that platforms this knowledge for others, is a strength that Pierce fortunately possesses—fortunately for them, and for the Geneseo community.