Technology, democracy (explicit in the subtitle), rhetoric education and
curricular reform recur as themes in Lanham’s The Electronic Word.
The book sets out with an overarching consideration of the material,
instrumental and ideological transitions in the interfacial revolution from book
to screen. The screen has rattled the "reign of textual truth" (x), opened
up the meaning of "text," and, consequently, challenged traditional-humanist
rationale for moralistic training via literary works (lots on the Great Books
debate here) . EW is set up for reading as a continuous book and also as
discrete chapters, according to Lanham; the chapters make frequent intratextual
reference (i.e., "In chapter 7, I…"). He gives readings of
rhetorical/philosophical traditions and more recent –phobe and –phile
orientations toward microcomputers and related computing activities–activities
he regards as deeply rhetorical and thoroughly transformative for commonplaces
about text, decorum, higher ed, and the humanities. EW is probably
one of the earlier takes on a digital rhetorics, even if he frames a compelling
range of precursors (xi)–"a new and radical convertibility" of "word image and
sound" (xi) staged in Cage’s experimental art and music, Duchamp’s readymades
and even K. Burke’s poetry.
Tag: rhetoric
“We Are Coming” – Logan (1999)
In 691 (Method~ologies) this week we’re considering historical methods and
reading for such methods specifically through the Shirley Wilson Logan’s work in
"We Are Coming": The
Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women. In the
preface, Logan speaks briefly to her method: "Since rhetorical analysis requires
an understanding of the formal features of a text in conjunction with its
historical context, I consider pertinent historical details–biographical,
social, political and cultural. Moving from the historical, I address
various characteristics of a chosen text in the light of these details.
The selection of characteristics is informed by classical rhetoric and its
twentieth-century reconstructions. My hope is that these discussions might
also add to a clearer understanding of nineteenth-century culture and of the
ways in which the persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women adapted
itself to its multiple audiences and multilayered exigencies" (xvi). As
well as any passage I could locate, these few sentences give a fairly complete,
succinct overview of the project.
Barthes – Rhetoric of the Image (1964)
In the advertising image, nice bright colors–a net-sack of Panzani pasta and
assorted spaghettimakers including vegetables, fresh and plenty.
Though non-linear, many of the signs accord with a variety of "euphoric values,"
says Barthes: domestic preparation, freshness, an unpacking, the casual
market-knowledge of slow foods of a pre-mechanical pace (no need for
preservation, refrigeration). Also, in the coordination of colors and types,
Barthes suggests second meaning–Italianicity or a gathering of things
Italian, much of this "based on a familiarity with certain tourist stereotypes"
(34). Each of these meanings match with distinctive kinds of knowledge.
A This-side of Language
On trauma and image from RB, "The Photographic Message":
These few remarks sketch a kind of differential table of photographic
connotations, showing, if nothing else, that connotation extends a long way.
Is this to say that a pure denotation, a this-side of language, is
impossible? If such a denotation exists, it is perhaps not at the level of
what ordinary language calls the insignificant, the neutral, the objective,
but, on the contrary, at the level of absolutely traumatic images. The
trauma can be seized in a process of photographic signification but then
precisely they are indicated via a rhetorical code which distances, sublimates
and pacifies them. Truly traumatic photographs are rare, for in
photography the trauma is wholly dependent on the certainty that the scene
‘really’ happened: the photographer had to be there (the mythical
definition of denotation). Assuming this (which, in fact, is already a
connotation), the traumatic photograph (fires, shipwrecks, catastrophes,
violent deaths, all captured ‘from life as lived’) is the photograph about
which there is nothing to say; the shock-photo is by structure insignificant:
no value, no knowledge, at the limit no verbal categorization can have a hold
on the process instituting the signification. One could imagine a kind
of law: the more direct the trauma, the more difficult its connotation; or
again, the ‘mythological’ effect of a photograph is inversely proportional to
its traumatic effect. (30)
"The more difficult its connotation…," close to what Jeff posted
Monday at
this Public Address on
spectacle, disaster and "signature images."
Barthes – The Photographic Message (1961)
Press photographs. Barthes refers to several such photographs in this
essay from 1961. He was concerned with contending orders of connoted
and denoted meanings operable in the reading of photographs. The
"photographic paradox," as he puts it, involves the double structure of
contending linguistic orders (connotative, denotative) and the photograph as
analogon, "a message without code" (17). Paradoxically, the press
photograph bears a "continuous message" sustained in the two significant
structures (of which "only one is linguistic"…either accompanying text or
description). Barthes calls the relationship between the image and the text
"contiguous" rather than "homogenous" (16). And so the photograph must be read
with some awareness of these variations, which lead to variations in meaning.
Barthes: "What can at least be done now is to forecast the main planes of
analysis of photographic connotation" (20).
Kinaesthetics, Intensive Gatherings and Bodily Arts
The body itself becomes a sundromos, an intensive gathering of forces
(of desire, of vigorous practices, of musical sounds, of corporeal codes),
trafficked through and by neurons, muscles and organs. Entwined with the
body in this way, rhetorical training thus exceeds the transmission of ‘ideas,’
rhetoric the bounds of ‘words.’ (Hawhee 160)
Yesterday I attended a Writing Program mini-seminar on the relationship
between the writing center and athletics and the presence of
student-athletes in writing courses. As a part of ongoing professional
development, most writing teachers at SU attend two mini-seminars each semester.
The speaker–a graduate student in rhetoric at Arizona–brought many insights;
he’s been instrumental in launching a satellite writing center in the athletic
department at UofA, and so the four-hour session was aptly named "Home Turf:
Defining Access and Success for College Student-Athletes." Early on, the
conversation hinged on the spatial quality of athletic performance; for
pre-reading, we looked at Hawhee’s "Bodily Pedagogies: Rhetoric, Athletics, and
the Sophists’ Three Rs," from College English, Andrew Zimbalist’s chapter
"The Student as Athlete" from Unpaid Professionals, Wilfred Bailey’s
"Summary: Time Constraints, Or Why Most College Athletes Cannot Also Be
Students," (College Sports, Inc.) and a few articles from
ESPN.com on whistle-blowers. We also talked through perceptions of
student-athlete privilege, so-called "problematic sports" of men’s basketball
and football (with no direct justification for crediting this commonplace to any
particular institution, much less SU), and part-time faculty bearing added labor
because of support measures (email check-ins from coaches, mid-semester progress
reports, etc.) initiated from athletics.
Rusesabagina and Network Externality
We walked two blocks over to the Westcott Movie House last evening to catch
an 8 p.m. showing of
Hotel Rwanda.
The Westcott is a single-show, old-style theater with only mildly graded seating
so part of the view includes half-head silhouettes from the people one row up.
Westcott picks up a few arts-cinema runs, shows them once each weekday and twice
on weekends.
G.W.B. on Dred Scott
We watched the debate with friends last night, quasi-Superbowl-party
style. I wasn’t impressed with the town hall model, particularly for the
way is positioned the audience members as dupes–mere question-readers, polite
listeners (to say nothing of the homogeneity of the sample of folks from the St.
Louis metro area). I know the candidates simply wouldn’t allow for follow
up questions, but what good is a town hall forum if the questions are safely
sanitized (which we can expect in all of the debates) *and* the question-askers
don’t get to ask for clarification, nuance, specificity? I want answers.
For a few minutes this morning, I’ve been reading these
fine
entries on the
debate. Good points all around. The two strangest moments of the
debate–for me–were the small business, lumber company setup (Want to buy some
wood?) and the reference to Dred
Scott as
an example of justices failing to perform a "strict" reading of the
U.S. Constitution and instead to render a decision clouded by personal
opinion. Relative to the Dred Scott reference, the live events in the debate, however, were neither clear nor
understandable as GWB spoke; as I looked back at the transcript
this morning, I thought the record, as formatted with sentence and paragraph
breaks, was generous to the President’s fumbling of "slaves as personal
property" as a matter of "personal opinion":
I would pick somebody who would not allow their
personal opinion to get in the way of the law. I would pick somebody who would
strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States.Let me give you a couple of examples, I guess, of the
kind of person I wouldn’t pick.I wouldn’t pick a judge who said that the Pledge of
Allegiance couldn’t be said in a school because it had the words "under
God" in it. I think that’s an example of a judge allowing personal
opinion to enter into the decision-making process as opposed to a strict
interpretation of the Constitution.Another example would be the Dred Scott case, which is
where judges, years ago, said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of
personal property rights.That’s a personal opinion. That’s not what the
Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we’re all
— you know, it doesn’t say that. It doesn’t speak to the equality of
America. [emphasis added]And so, I would pick people that would be strict
constructionists. We’ve got plenty of lawmakers in Washington, D.C.
Legislators make law; judges interpret the Constitution.And I suspect one of us will have a pick at the end of
next year — the next four years. And that’s the kind of judge I’m going to
put on there. No litmus test except for how they interpret the Constitution.
A few critiques of Bush’s resorting to the Dred Scott case to address his
criteria for justice selections have–as you might expect–already made it to
the blogosphere. Particularly thoughtful takes turned up here
and here.
I’m sure the reference to the case was a grab at local resonance (much like
Edwards’ reference to the number of U.N. workers running the Afghanistan
elections as fewer than it would take to setup polling stations in Cleveland);
the judgment about slaves as citizens stemmed from St. Louis some 150 years ago. It resulted from Missouri’s slave-state status set against Illinois, a free state, just across Mississippi River.
The most ironic aspect of Bush’s reference to the case is that Justice Roger
Taney–in 1857–rendered a judgment against Dred Scott and his fundamental human
rights because–as I understand it–Taney read the U.S. Constitution as a
"strict constructionist," which explains the Fourteenth Amendment
(1868) as a correction to the dangerous mis-applications of constitutional law
along strict, "that’s what the words say" readings of
"property" and "citizenship." With "strict
constructionist" justices, then, I suppose you get readings of the law that
are so narrow and rigid that constitutional amendments are required to ensure
equal rights for all people.
Under Ten Minutes
So if you had to do a ten minutes or less talk on Foucault and
rhetoric as epistemic and it had to push off from The Order of Things,
what would you be sure to mention? Just curious.
Newer habit: fashionably tippling water from a Diet Pepsi bottle. Can’t
believe the ugly habits that emerge from being stacked-up busy. I call it Aqua
Pepsi–free refills at the hallway fountain.
Dodged an Eagleton-Williams one-two on C|culture|s in class this
evening. RayWill–for good reason–got the hog’s share our attention, but
I left wondering whether Eagleton, in his coup de gras was joshing around
when he says, "It is time, while acknowledging its significance, to put
[culture] back in its place." Hedging, I say. Er, or so I
said in hunk of my mini analysis paper. Note for later: bask in
Williams’ chunk on "The Structure of Feeling" just a bit more. A warm
feeling in there.
Tomorrow: Office hours teeming with visiting students (What do you
want, exactly!?); Resnikoff’s NUC-MLC newsletter from 1969, Sondra Perl on
"The Composing Processes of the Unskilled College Writer," C. Wright
Mills, "Letter to the New Left," Jerry Farber and Louis Kampf, and
MaCrorie’s Uptaught; and touching up a few teaching details, as in what
next.
On "snooty
intellectual debate" (scroll to bottom): check out the letter to the ed
in today’s Post-Standard responding to new chancellor Nancy Cantor’s
invitation to the community for a visit to campus as part of the "Soul of
Syracuse" campaign.
Mortensen/Kirsch, 1994, “Authority”
Mortensen,
Peter and Gesa Kirsch. "On Authority in the Study of Writing.” On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays, 1975-1998.
Ed. Lisa Ede. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1999. 321-335.
Big Idea
Clearly enough, Mortensen and Kirsch set out to complicate conceptions of
authority beyond the autonomous, paternalistic, heavy-handed sort long
understood to be the source of oppression, as in a hegemony of control and
order. This essay emphasizes the role of ethics and care in
contextualized authority systems, where power is understood through community
assimilation and distrust of autonomous authoritative forces are out in the
open. Mortensen and Kirsch urge a shift away from long-accepted connotations of authority
as the continuation of autonomous and paternalistic legacies.
More complex variations of authority look at knowledge sources as contextual,
assumable, provisional, situated (or locally distributed), and ethical. By
turning to feminist critique, the essay seeks to loosen and re-associate the
significance of authority in relationship to discourse, power, and
community, the buzzwords of the 90’s
in writing and rhetoric.
Wondering About
"On Authority in the Study of Writing" leads with a note about Barthes and
dead authors, followed by mention of modernity’s unraveling of authorship
resulting in language re-styling English Studies, followed by the
question, "How are we to account for the theoretical erasure of the authority
that constitutes the writers–the authors–we face every day in our composition
classrooms?". Authors are dead; authority is dead. Right? That’s
the linch pin for Mortensen and Kirsch, since authority is alive and well.
But where? They’re certainly not faulting Barthes for his excise of
authors; in fact, his move gave us good cause to look at all of the other,
perhaps more complex manifestations of authority, various forms wrapped in
power, discourse, and community dynamics. I’d say this essay does a
terrific job of sizing up those forms, pointing them out, and reminding me that
they aren’t all evil (which is often my suspicion). In fact, M&K’s answer
to the question is that there are at least two predominant perspectives on
authority–assimilation and resistance–and we (with our students) ought to know
both of them as well as other, subtler forms.
I’m not ready to answer M&K’s question about "theoretical erasure" because
I’d prefer to ask it just a bit differently, replacing "erasure," I think, with
"complexity." Of course this kind of critique can give way to endless
tinkering. I won’t do that. But just this one turn–complexity
rather than erasure–would allow the question to point out what I think this essay does.
Old, autonomous authority isn’t dead; it’s just buried (read: nested, resting).
And maybe we should be just as distrusting of new authority (contextual,
assumable, provisional, situated, ethical) because it’s more elusive, harder to
know, but potentially as controlling, power-wielding, and uncaring.
Potentially. And then "how are we to account for the theoretical [complexity]
of the authority that constitutes the writers–the authors–we face every day in
our composition classrooms?". Rhetoric: running the range of persuasive,
effective, compelling postures in variously authority-laden situations.