Thursday, November 2, 2006

Brooke, "Forgetting to be (Post)Human"

Brooke, Collin Gifford. "Forgetting to be (Post)Human: Media and Memory in a Kairotic Age." JAC 20.4 (Fall 2000): 775-95.

Rather than lumping posthumanism with the other post-isms, Brooke draws on frameworks pursued by Hayles in How We Became Posthuman and Latour in We Have Never Been Modern as a way to resolve rhetoric's exceptional role in patching the nature/culture rift (Hayles' corollary, "we have always been posthuman" catalyzes this path of inquiry). Rhetoric, a "posthuman rhetoric" according to Brooke, is repositioned in the space of Latour's hybrids. Turning next to ancient rhetorics, Brooke points to Gorgias as one whose rhetoric enacted the imbroglio that resisted the polarization toward designations of artificial and natural. Like the Gordian knot Latour wishes for us to re-tie (it was unraveled by modernist purification), the Gorgian knot suggested by Brooke draws on posthumanism to furnish a both/and compromise that, rather than viewing memory as natural (as in orality; see Plato) or artificial (as in writing, electracy, secondary orality [?]), instead views it as doubly applicable to our "hypermediated society" (788). In other words, posthuman rhetoric would keep us cognizant of the error involved in tipping too far toward either a presumption of memory's naturalness (truth in mediation, such as Rodney King film footage segmented into individual images) or its artificiality (the rhetoric of antirhetoric). Brooke uses the counterparts of kairos and chronos to explain that the disembodiment of information (e.g., w/ King and the Challenger explosion) should call back into question the material manipulation of media that taken to be natural.

Key terms: hermeneuts of suspicion (776), convergence (776), Hayles' semiotics of virtuality (777), novelty (778), biotechnology (782), Gorgian knot (783), Valesio's rhetoric of antirhetoric (784), mimesis (785), Ong's secondary orality (787), Ulmer's electracy (787), discursive ecology (787), chronos and kairos (790), posthuman rhetoric (791).

"Bailiff's citation of both the postmodern and the posthuman, however, marks a distinction I want to pursue in the first part of this essay by claiming that the posthuman is not simply the latest in our academic procession of post-isms. In the first section I turn to the work of Katherine Hayles and Bruno Latour in an effort to articulate a space for posthumanism that is distinct from the modern/postmodern complex" (776).

"I transpose Hayles' own 'semiotics of virtuality' to the field of rhetoric, suggesting that the revision of memory that results may provide us with our best hope for tempering the will to knowledge that is one of our modernist legacies, an inheritance that has been intensified with recent advances in technology" (778).

"In fact, the network of relations among speaking and being spoken, nature and culture, and agency and determinism might seem to us the very sort of Gordian knot Latour seeks to retie" (783).

"From its inception, rhetoric does not claim to be anything but artificial; indeed, it is its artificiality that renders it transferable and teachable" (784).

"After Plato, rhetoric is an artificial construct, one that encourages us to conceive of our relationship to language as one of production and control" (784). ^Valesio's rhetoric of antirhetoric.

"Whether or not the shift from orality to literacy carries with it a corresponding change in mental faculties, it has a radical effect on the environment in which we think and act, which amounts to the same thing, according to Edwin Hutchins. Hayles glosses Hutchins' point: 'Modern humans are capable of more sophisticated cognition than cavemen not because moderns are smarter...but because they have constructed smarter environments in which to work' (289)" (786).

"As our memories and technologies have become more artificial, they have done so only as far as they circle back and approach the appearance of the natural" (787).

"We must reconceive the canon of memory, complicating the binary that Plato provides and reopening a space within our hypermediated rhetoric for the recognition of experience" (790).

"Why a postmodern rhetoric might privilege kairos over chronos, a posthuman rhetoric would find room for both" (791).

"As our technologies tempt us with the possibility of absolute (patterned) knowledge via the purified technologies of mediation (absence), a posthuman rhetoric would require us to temper that possibility with the materially situated emergence (presence) or opportunities (randomness)" (791).

Related sources:
Hutchins, Edwin. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1995.
Valesio, Paolo. Novantiqua: Rhetorics as a Contemporary Theory. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.
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