Takeaways from 733

The takeaways from this course are really divided into two areas for me: Problematizing the ideas I already had about rhetoric and expanding my view of rhetoric. These are, of course, related. In many classes the goal is simply to expand a knowledge base with the idea that more knowledge means greater intellect. But more can probably be gained from questioning the beliefs (or “facts”) that we already possess. Sometimes the best way to call these beliefs into question is by expanding our knowledge base and then synthesizing. For me—especially since I have had the opportunity to take 733 and 603 simultaneously—733 has been a place to synthesize. That’s where I learned the most.

            First, the expansion. On the most basic level I ended up reading more the Rhetorical Tradition than I did as an MA student. But instead of looking at “pieces of rhetoric” we also began to explore systems of rhetoric and how they come to define the larger tradition. (The book, The Rhetorical Tradition, was not discussed, but rather acted as a warehouse of texts in my MA program.) I also developed a better sense of writing technologies (most notably language and writing) and how they came to shape not just culture, but also thought processes. The differentiation of speech and writing and their complicated relationship came to light a little better. I also have a fuller sense of history. One of the recurring themes about RT that became apparent in our classroom critiques is that it is a person-based text. History as a class (and the last one I took was as an undergrad) is usually event based. So, in looking at these historical figures, I gained another dimension of the construct we call history.

            Then came the problems. The systems of knowledge really bugged me at first—the whole idea that we are operating inside this ideology and can’t get out of it. I guess this is why the RT began to bother me so much: because as a text it really came to exemplify how we create these ideas and then make institutions that reinforce these ideas and turn them into ideologies. My interest in libraries and the Dewey Decimal Classification comes from this vein. I also began to note some of the discrepancies or exclusions from history, causing me to question how history is formed and how it operates as a system itself. The usual components of history—events, people, and politics—began to crystallize as rhetorical. (Think of the suffrage movement in history versus how it is approached in RT.) Add the writing technologies into the mix and I began to appreciate the seemingly less significant movements in the history of rhetoric like letter writing or the use of silence.

            That’s more than 2-3 things and nothing that really zeros in on a takeaway. (And thus is my focus this semester.) How about this as my big takeaway: Our goal as teachers should not be to stuff the students’ heads with “new” information like logos, ethos, kairos and whatever other Greek words we can rustle up. Instead, maybe we can better teach by slowly expanding the students’ world in ways that challenge their beliefs. We need to be interdisciplinary. (We’ve seen what a rift in the humanities can do in the long term.) We also need to design assignments that challenge students’ perceptions of writing. First, we need to make writing relevant by giving it venue, audience, and kairotic purpose. Secondly, we need to broaden our notions of rhetoric in the first-year classroom. Why do we assign papers? Speeches, videos, system design, and metadata are the rhetorics we should be concerned with now. I saw this article about one of Kurt Vonnegut’s writing assignments and it struck me as particularly useful. (Then it struck me that he was doing this nearly five decades ago.) We should be looking at texts, yes, but we also need to acknowledge the tools and the methods of production.

Reflection on that time we all blogged

Sheridan et al’s book rightfully foregrounds kairos as being especially important to multimodal composition. The synergies that take place through multiple modes invigorate traditional forms of writing/speech/thinking. If those new, invigorated forms are made to interact with other forms, the synthesis creates new ideas. The computer is the first tool that breaks down the production time so ideas can be synthesized during the process of creation. Eisenstein describes the process and material conditions of writing during the rise of the printing press. She also describes the infrastructures necessary to transport these texts to locations where they could be synthesized (ahem, libraries). No single invention allowed the author to draft, synthesize/network, publish, and disseminate until the computer.

            Porter remarks on the uniqueness of the computer’s contribution to writing as he dismantles Dennis Baron’s argument that computers are no different really from pencils. Pencils are a great and revolutionary technology, sure. But Porter says “Rather the revolution is the networked computer and the social/rhetorical contexts it creates and the way its use impacts publishing practices” (384-85). If a pencil could do that, we would have a conference called “Pencils and Writing” like Baron glibly suggests. Computers remove barriers, eliminate time lag, and erase spatial differences. I’ll use an example from my IMS 171 class.

            I made a study guide on Google Docs and asked my students to fill it out collectively. They had a week to do it. So for the first six days the occasional student logged on, dropped in a few notes and signed out. But then, on the night before the exam, 8-12 students (depending on the moment) were chatting, adding notes and editing. (I was in there too, but really being more of a morale booster than a contributor.) The results were not surprising: students who participated in creating the page on the night before did better than the ones who simply dropped in some notes early in the week (or those who only viewed the page).

            [And here I have to stop and go over the rationale for having an exam. The hope is that the students pay attention to the concepts and theories presented in class because the exam will test their knowledge in scary ways. As a teacher I need them to be familiar with the theories and concepts for the second half of the course, which is largely project/application-based.]

            This all brings me to the second question addressed in last week’s blogs. How do we teach multimodal rhetoric? Kathleen I thought really got to the heart of the matter (and gave me some clarity into my own teaching practices) when she wrote, “to create appropriate responses is to first create an assignment that allows students to craft their own responses first.” My study guide was more effective than the exam because it operated in the public sphere in a kairotic way. (What if the study guide was the exam?) In the conversation following Kathleen’s post, the respondents (myself included) discussed what constraints might hinder/aid in the composition.

            In her post on the same question Keely rightly points out the possible anarchy of letting students have free reign over all of cyberspace. She states, “ I think [Sheridan et al] are just asking that teachers offer multiple choices to their students so that they can weigh the potential effectiveness of the different methods with respect to their topics and messages.” In effect, students are being asked to analyze the venue for delivery—since the constraints are often implicit in the venue. (And that’s even a bit of a misnomer as my students really stretched what the Google Doc was originally meant to do.)

            Putting all of these answers together really challenges traditional notions of teaching. Should we be talking about venues as design choice and audience? Do compressed time frames lead to better synthesis and communication between students? (If my experience teaching a compressed summer course is any indication, the answer is yes.) Should we be providing frameworks that are limiting to the students in ways that force them to address the platform? (An essay written via twitter? A public argument made solely through Instagram?) And now I have to turn the question back on our more conventional teaching moments: When we simply assign an essay without venue constraints (and only thoughts of the imaginary audience) are we inviting anarchy in the writing process?

Chinese American Rhetoric

Mao’s Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie works within Pratt’s idea of contact zones. While Mao could spend his time discussing the “grappling” parts of Pratt’s idea, he instead focuses more productively on the creative energies produced in the asymmetrical power dynamic (22). Instead of looking at either Chinese or American rhetoric (and, by extension, how they jockey for dominance), Mao examines where the rhetorics meet—the borderland rhetoric of the Chinese American. The idea of Chinese American rhetoric, Mao is careful to point out, is more than a hybridized form of language. Chinese American rhetoric could simply be viewed as another “other” discourse acting in opposition to the dominant form of rhetoric. Instead, Mao says the Chinese American rhetoric works to “blur the boundary and to destabilize the binary between the dominant and subordinated” (32). This non-oppositional position has come to define how I understand borderland rhetorics.

            In both Mao’s text and Lyon’s article, I found the Derridian notion of definition through difference as also key to my understanding. Mao adopts a “togetherness-in-difference” approach that moves beyond looking at the discourse as simply agonistic because it is different. This allows him to view the Chinese American rhetoric as a rhetoric of “becoming” (32-33). Lyon takes a more western stance on difference by looking at the departures of Eastern and Western rhetorics in terms of grammar and style (132). And though this may seem less productive than Mao’s approach, I think that having both perspectives is essential to defining a rhetoric that fits neither side of the binary. As Derrida notes in “Differance,” we can only define things in relation to one another. It becomes impossible for us to see Chinese American rhetoric as something outside of not-Chinese and not-American, so we come to view it as Other. But if we look at it as something that is becoming we see it as actively moving between power structures independently.

            Mao really brings this out in Chapter Five when he describes the Chinese American response to John Elkington’s disparaging remarks about Chinese clients. Not only is the mobilization and networking of the community impressive, but the rhetoric of protest differs greatly from what is widely perceived as the American way to protest (picketing, harsh confrontation, legal recourse, etc.). Mao selects passages that are reflective in their approach—ones where the speaker is situating him/her heritage in relation to both Chinese and American. Time is also a factor. The past informs the present and the present defines this moment. But all of this—the rhetoric of becoming—culminates as they speaker asks the audience (in this case city council) to look with them at the possibilities laid out for the future. The prefacing quote of the chapter from Bourdieu is especially telling with language that evokes Bakhtin’s notions of utterances, heteroglossia, and social language. To examine Elkington’s comments from that perspective asks the audience to account for a history of oppression and an environment where these remarks could be acceptable (which Mao points out may have been the case since no councilperson spoke out at the time).

            The ultimate effect of this sort of rhetoric is a non-oppositional dialogue. The speaker engages the audience (who is active in defining the speaker through difference) and puts the audience in a position where they have to actively shape what the future might look like. This matches Canagarajah’s call to teach “teach communicative strategies—i.e., creative ways to negotiate the norms relevant in diverse contexts” (593). The grammar is far less important, than communicating clearly.

            In one sentence in particular I was struck at how many levels this works on simultaneously. Mao writes, “To claim, as did Mr. Elkington, that these remarks were meant as a ‘joke’ either reveals his own chutzpah that he can get away with uttering such remarks in public, or speaks to the significant challenges we border residents face as we try to promote co-presence and mutual understanding through the discourse of togetherness-in-difference” (128). Besides incorporating a Yiddish word into a conversation about Chinese-American relationships (yet another form of togetherness-in-difference), this sentence does a couple amazing things. First, it sets up an either-or binary, which we recognize as a trap (usually). But the way out of this dichotomous thinking is in the use of pronouns. Mao carefully selects inclusive pronouns to describe the challenges “we” face. He further distances us from Elkington by putting the word joke into quotes. The utterance is Elkington’s though the nature of language is social. It is because the language is social and we’re included in the dialogue that we have to opportunity to change the conversation. 

Notes, Star Trek, and dead authors

So I read this article about note-taking in the NY Times.

No actually, I saw a tweet about the article in the NY Times on Bronwyn Williams’ feed.

I started following Bronwyn because I saw his presentation at Watson and really liked it.

Well, that’s not how it actually happened. I didn’t seek Bronwyn out on Twitter. I followed some other folks I saw at conferences and he came up a recommended person to follow and I saw his presentation at Watson so I did.

But I recognized Bronwyn all the same because I had read his book, Shimmering Literacies, and really like the idea of fan culture, especially the one surrounding Star Trek.

I grew up on Star Trek. My dad watched it.

The point is that I read this article on note-taking.

Wait, that’s not the point. What is the point? It’s far more complex than I-read-this-article-because-my-dad-watched-Star Trek-and-Bronwyn-wrote-a-book-about-it-so-now-I-follow-him-on-Twitter-and-go-to-see-his-conference-presentations. It’s about understanding text, how we remember it and how we re-deliver it. The paradox here is the same one that technologist Stephen Carr explores in Is Google Making Us Stupid?: Digital technologies have powerful abilities and operate in very complicated ways, but they also obscure their complexity in favor of access. We can find answers more easily, but think less critically. It’s far easier for me to show the simple trajectory of the I-produced-this-and-it’s-published-here rather than the tangled rhetorical webs Sheridan et al use to illustrate the complexity of composition in the digital age.

The webs also bring up the idea of intertextuality. Just as the article I hyperlinked at the start of this ramble outlines how technologies themselves also change the way we record our thoughts and how those records inform our memories, this blogpost reappropriates what we’ve learned in this class (from readings, discussion, videos, etc.) and puts them in communication with other ongoing conversations. The connections between the texts, the conversations that happen around them, is where knowledge is generated (like Bakhtin’s dialogism). I read the NY Times article differently when I viewed it as something posted by Williams—it put it squarely into what I recognize as one of his fields of interest (something I know from reading his book and seeing him at conferences). At the same time, I am seeing it as a news story and reading it within my own contexts, including this class. When I put them together in a move of juxtaposition, I develop new understandings of not just the texts, but their contexts. Digital technologies give me the ability to create mash-up composition. Yes, we can talk about audio and video mash-ups, but I’m talking here more about the authorial mash-up. I can include hyperlinks, images, videos—or traditional block quotes and excerpts—to create “new” texts.

And it’s the flexible idea of newness and ownership that I think underlie the whole of Sheridan et al’s book, though they call it kairos. In the 20^th century we’ve become really tied to the idea that books are commodity and the name of the author on the spine owns the thoughts put into print. (Side story: I remember growing up and marveling at the first time I saw my dad highlight in a book. “You can do that?” I asked. “It’s my book,” dad said. Some part of me believed the book could not be deconstructed. I’ve gotten over that obviously.) The point (again) is that texts and ideas are not these monolithic creations. They are collaborative and formed through various spheres with varying degrees of accessibility. By detaching the text from the physical page it becomes easier to access it and mash it up (or, in the case of music or film, to “pirate” it). Just like the print age and the format of the codex ushered in a construct of sole authorship, I think the digital age is breaking down this notion. Which leaves me asking how we should be thinking of authorship now. Besides being dead (thanks, Barthes), what does an author actually do? Is this the age of Arrangement as the key rhetorical canon?

Aren't these texts more a study in western interpretation?

I have to wonder about The Rhetorical Tradition after reading Baca’s essay. It seems that there is no way to move outside of our western-minded ideals and experience because of our language and the rhetorical tradition that has been instilled through this language. Baca identifies the dilemma as a “cultural double bind” wherein “either Mexican ‘rhetorics’ are so different from Greco-Roman ones that Western thinkers cannot consider them rhetoric proper” or “Mexican expression must become similar to and absorbed by Western conceptualizations of persuasive speech” (128). It appears as if the westerner’s inclination is to populate the discourse of other’s with their own thoughts, words, and cultural ideas. We (and I use “we” to mean westerners as I am one—and in writing “we” it seems as if I am trying to subjugate my reader) have a tendency to translate rather than understand. We find the cognates of Mexican rhetoric in our own classical understandings; we look at speech as a form of persuasion rather than as poetics and metaphor and expression like Anzaldua’s rhetoric. And in examining it this way, we end up either populating/colonizing it as ours or we end up destroying it because of its Otherness. (In this entry I am looking at the former. My previous post paid more attention to the violence associated with these rhetorics.)

            Earlier in his essay, Baca outlines the problematic nature of reading Anzaldua’s work as a translation: “[Borderlands] will be persistently misunderstood, mistranslated, and misappropriated unless comprehended as ‘new’ rationalities and practices that emerge from the conditions created by colonial legacies” (124). To put it in terms of colonialism, I have to wonder if the Rhetorical Tradition’s use of translation creates a power dynamic that subjugates discourse and forces the Other to become western. Again, I want to relate this to Bakhtin and his idea of dialogism—that a hegemonic dialogue disempowers and shapes the utterances of the Other. The dominant voices of the Rhetorical Tradition are still those Western thinkers that frontload the tome—Aristotle, Plato, Vico, Bacon, Augustine, etc. Even the marginalized, rediscovered figures of Aspasia contribute to the western hegemony of the Tradition. By the time we encounter the rhetorics that step outside of the western mind, the tradition of what-is-rhetoric and what-is-not-rhetoric has already been established. The editors—part of the dominant discourse community—are the ones who give Anzaldua her standing as a rhetor. They do it by inclusion, translation, and most markedly, in their introduction.

            Keep in mind I am not necessarily chiding the editors (this time). But I think that as humans we cannot step outside of ourselves and experience the other. We come to develop our understandings through difference (at least that’s what Derrida argues in my Lit Theory class). The editors seem forget their relationship to these texts, and in forgetting, they populate the discourse with their Western ideology. We can see an illustration of the power relations (literally) in Pratt’s essay as she analyzes the changing dynamics of Andeans and Spaniards in Poma’s New Chronicle (35-36). It seems like a basic thing—that to show domination of something we put it above or first (think of winning a wrestling match or where God sits in relation to humans), but this is forgotten in the compilation of a text.

            [Warning: Another tangent on capitalism and oppression ahead.]

            But is it really forgotten? I have to go back to Eisenstein here and look at the major moving force in Western culture—print. As Pratt notes, “the main instrument that made bourgeois nation-building projects possible was print capitalism” (37). So now I have to broaden my scope out a little more: What has been colonized in the university? Are oral traditions populated by the Western move to put everything into print? What about our tenure systems and how we perceive “fact” over “hearsay” or “rumor”? I think it says a great deal about our fixedness as westerners when we only come to look at Andean persecution in Poma’s text (which was authored as a book to appeal to the dominant discourse community) which was interpreted for us by Pratt. This is how we experience the Other in the west. 

Embodied rhetoric

I was in a not-so-great American Literature course when I was an undergrad. The professor—a smart guy with no sense of pedagogy—did say some things that stuck with me for one reason or another. One had to do with Thoreau and his obsession with walking—not the action, mind you, but the mechanics of it. The miracle that our legs as flesh and bone allow us bipedal movement across terrain. “At this time,” the professor told us, “the body was of diminished importance, losing its standing to the mind and soul.” Western philosophers were, as my professor put it, obsessed with thought and soul-searching. They were far less concerned with the mechanics (the electrical, plumbing, and circulation) of the body.

            In a class like American Lit this is a fair statement. We did, after all, spend the bulk of the term talking about early America’s identification with England and classical narrative structures of Rome and Greece and how they were re-manifested and/or subverted. This literary tradition is a view recognizes the absence of the body; but while acknowledging the absence, it negates the cultures that were emphasizing the importance of embodiment. In a way, this Americanized view of otherness, re-colonizes the canon in the most violent of ways—by destroying the body of the other. (I’m reminded of Ann Cvetkovich, “Marx’s Capital and the Mystery of the Commodity,” where she interprets Marx’s Das Capital as a murder scene—but here there is a murder with no body but all of the bloody evidence that there was a crime.)

            The bodily violence in our readings seems to center on the mouth. In Borderlands, the opening image is one of oppression and uncomfortable imagery as the tongue is “tamed”—a metaphor picked up by Baca in his essay. Reminiscent of Cixous and the violence surrounding the lovely gagged mouth of the female figure (1526), Anzaldua’s own voice resists being tamed, shaped, colonized, and populated with the voices of other more dominate cultures. In terms of Bakhtinian dialogism, this would be like going to join the chorus of heteroglossia, but finding out that your utterance is actually the speech of someone else entirely. Anzaldua provides us with vignettes (which, in another essay, I might say reflects the structures of memory) where she takes in the various cultures and language formations and traditions surrounding her. She forms thought through inner speech and when she opens her mouth to tell as story to her sister, it is her own remixed voice that comes out.

            I should pause here for a moment and point out the section called “The Shamanic State”  (1594) wherein the connection between the body and mind is made explicit. Physical sensations generate from Anzaldua’s writing—fevers, joy, healing, etc. What’s more is that she gets physically ill when she goes without writing. In reading Anzaldua, we come to see writing not just as an activity of the mind or soul, but one that is of the body and tied to physical existence. [I view this in the way that sociologists look at the need for human contact at a young age. Infants need to be held and talked to in order to thrive. When infants die because they were not engaged with as humans, the term is known as “failure to thrive.”]

            All of the sudden the university’s prohibition on chicana literature takes on a new heir of violence and oppression. (And Anzaldua as an academic in that institution had a failure to thrive.) So the violence is actually done to the thing that gives us voice, that allows us to join into a discourse community. By ripping out the tongue or stitching a mouth shut, knocking out a tooth or any other number of violent acts, the mouth is not simply shut—rather, the individual with her voice and thoughts is destroyed. To paraphrase from earlier in the semester, the link between mind and tongue is severed. But let’s not view this as a metaphor; let’s put it into a colonial perspective where speaking out of turn literally resulted in the muscle of the tongue being sliced out of a mouth with a razor. When we ask “what’s at stake?” during a classroom conversation are we being this visceral? Should we be? Shouldn’t Douglass’ broken arm be analyzed as part of the context in which he was speaking? Genocides begin with silence and in order to be successful in their mission, they need to stay silent. If we forget about the body, aren’t we silencing the most important aspect of rhetoric?

Not a real post, but funny