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

Facebook and Focault

“An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a writer—but not an author” (Focualt 108).

I read this as someone in the digital age, a part of the Facebook generation, and I have to laugh at how well the words mesh with our own morphed ideas of those same words now mean. “Text,” “post,” and “wall” all now denote a digital sort of discourse where the writer and author are very much alive (despite what Barthes claims about the print text). I bring my ideas to Focault—and he’s dead. But what if this was his status update or a tweet? What if he posted an anonymous comment on a Yahoo story? Is he still dead if the dialogue is actively going on?

But the digital age does nothing to revive Barthes dead author, right? Authorship remains artificial. Right now I am writing this blogpost because I am enrolled in a grad class where we have to do two posts per week or else... I type it out in Word first and it usually catches most of my typos. I copy/paste it into Blogger and Google takes care of the formatting for me. After I hit “post” and the blog goes to my main page (or “wall”) am I only the writer here? Can I not take all the credit because I have all of these forces acting on me, shaping my discourse? Is my choice between Blogger and WordPress a form of authorship or do those spaces write me? (And, I should note here, that we begin to see the re-emergence of an interest in the body and embodied rhetorics.)

             Most significant is what Barthes calls the “total existence of writing”—the idea that “a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestations” (148). My blog is a response to a number of texts read each week and (hopefully) synthesized. I look at my peers’ blogs, the class blog rules, and author my next response. I take all of these thoughts and put them through the series of interfaces (or do the interfaces act like Burke’s terministic screens? I’m not sure.). When I take this into account it seems like I was barely alive to begin with and each time I post a little part of me dies. Writing just seals the deal.

            So we have all these forces acting on and shaping and reshaping text. Barthes goes on to remind us that the reader is also coming to the text with his/her own context. The author is done. The text is written. Now it’s the reader’s turn to contribute to the text. And this is where the breakdown is for me: it seems that the idea of author/writer and reader, where a text resides for Barthes is largely based in time. Barthes states that “The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and after” (145).  But the before and after is blurred in Cixous when she writes “as a woman, towards women” (1524). It is not just audience idenitifcation here; this is a movement in time that bridges the past and present. How is the author dead when she writes as if speaking directly to us?

            I’ll venture a guess and say that a large part of this has to do with the capitalist nature of the 20^th century—that we tend to view living and dead in terms of production. The dead is a final product, the thing produced from manual labor that becomes an artifact. Life is the process by which an artifact (fossil?) is found.

            This brings me back to digital writing—a Google doc, an instagram, or a iPhone location update. What happens to our idea of the dead author when the book in the material sense is erased? Is authorship really bound up in the material? Is the idea of the dead author dead because of digital context or does this digitized text cause an outer-body experience?

Another chapter in Speech & Writing

Burke is another chapter in the long strange relationship between speech, writing and language. Where we originally looked at the politics and traditions that grew out of each field, we now see the fragments of what once was umbrellaed as rhetoric interact in new ways and in effect create new knowledge. Burke in “What are the Signs of What?” takes the oral and written traditions and put them back in conversation with the more abstract idea of language—words become names, objects become symbols. According to Burke, our mode of communication is really a series of disjointed symbols bound up by context. Like I pointed out last week, this is the sort of theoretical underpinning that shapes Bakhtin’s idea of heteroglossia. Barthes contributes to the postmodern view of language (a term that really doesn’t “fit” anymore) when he defines text as “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146).  But it is the clashing and blending that language is actually formed. And language mediates culture.

            We see an example of this clashing and blending and how it informs our thoughts in Foucault’s essay when he troubles what we mean by “work” (103 and again on 104).  But this is a micro example when we begin to take in the much larger picture. Not only is this the difficulty we encounter with a single word; it is also the problematic nature of language (words, phrases, sentence structure, etc.) and, on an even larger level, culture. As Burke notes, “The world is run on the commonsense realistic assumption that there is a fairly accurate correspondence between the realm of everyday sensory objects and the vocabulary that names them” (375). Things get complicated when we begin to question them.

            The study of discourse is broken down by the postmodernists, yet there still seems to be this implicit pursuit of truth (maybe not with a capital t). And in the pursuit of truth new fields are created—like semiotics and cognitive linguistics (generic linguistics gets a shout out from Barthes on page 145). These are more voices adding to the heteroglossic mix of voices that together form perceptions (and hence also form themselves) as well as a sense of society.

            In Lit Theory we’ve been looking at how structures are defined inherently by their differences. That is, we look at the paradoxes that populate a structure and we see that those contradictions are the self-same things that give it its shape. It seems to be much the same for language with its divisions of speech and writing. When examining Cixous, I have to note that she opens the essay with “I shall speak...” (1524). Yet, she is writing. I do not think this is a mere oversight or the clumsiness of everyday language (i.e. “I was talking on facebook”). I think rather that Cixous is examining the contradictions of both traditions as she writes about writing and speaking. All of her thoughts, her language as a whole (both written and spoken)—all of the things that make her her—manifest onto the page. She means to do both. And she draws our attention to it by stating “It is time for women to start scoring their feats in written and oral language” (1527). Acting in the same vein as Bakhtin, Focault, and Barthes (dare I include Woolf?), Cixous breaks down the codified systems by which we consume culture and reappropriates them to create some understanding of our practices.  

            

Dialogue and war

The recovery of invention and audience in Lauer and Porter’s texts says a lot about not just where rhetoric was at a certain moment, but where it had been and where it would/will go. If we take that one moment and look at it we can tell that rhetoric was “lost” to academia for sometime. (Thanks, Blair.) What had been at the heart of classical rhetoric had been moved outside of the English department as we’ve discussed in the last couple weeks with the rise of the speech department. Audience and invention are moved out of the discipline and at that same moment we can see the trajectory of rhetoric at this moment. Then the New Rhetoric arrives (taking its cues from centuries before) and the term “renaissance” that Porter emphasizes on page 55 might be the most apt descriptor, for this is a rebirth. And the rebirth comes at a time when we are doing this looking forward and backward, being self-reflexive and questioning our motives. In a sense, we begin dialoguing our histories—quite literally in the Octolog.

Burke’s pentad analysis gets mentioned a few times in this week’s readings. I think of his pentad as especially emblematic of postmodernity with its changing motives and call for invention to address not just the writer, but also the critic (Lauer 87). By expanding invention into the realm of the critic and not just the writer, Burke subverts the Romantic notions of the solitary writer and embraces the heteroglossia of Bakhtin’s postmodern world. Just as the English department was never truly the one entity perpetuating curriculum, the writer is never the sole author of a text.

What seems to be revived here is the idea of dialectic for invention. In Burke’s case he seems to be acknowledging the past by allowing us as writers to sit down and puzzle out a series of pentads that forces us to examine other perspectives—and those other perspectives also take the form of audience. Perelman and Toulmin engaged in more of a dialogue. The end result of Bakhtin’s dialogism, Toulmin’s dialogue, and Burke’s dramatism is knowledge. How I end up seeing these sorts of dialogues is much like Bakhtin talks about heteroglossia—as a bunch of voices conversing to create a unified voice. When audience is taken out of the equation the unity of the voice tends to break down and bad things happen. Sure departmental politics are a pain, but it seems like the effect might be much farther reaching.

Last week I floated the idea that the disappearance of rhetoric in academia post-Civil War might have been an indictment of the failure of rhetoric to prevent the atrocity of war. Looking back over the moves to marginalize rhetoric it seems that acts of violence seem to be a re-set on how we consider rhetoric. So historically I think it makes sense that we see the New Rhetoric—one of the biggest resets—come after two world wars, the Korean War, and the onset of our involvement in Vietnam. What seems to be missing leading up to all of these conflicts is the sense of dialogue that disappeared after the Civil War. (Consider the chain of events that led up to the trigger of WWI as opposed to the one-sided media used to put troops in Vietnam—the dialogue grows progressively more one-sided.)

So am I saying that rhetoric’s diminished importance caused the wars of the 20^th century and the rise of the military-industrial complex? Not really. I think the position that rhetoric took is symptomatic of the culture that felt audience mattered less than delivery (which was on the rise). Now here my big, over-reaching question: With the development of delivery and audience combined in Web 2.0 technology, are we going to see a new age in warfare? Have we already seen a preview of what’s to come with the media’s coverage of Benghazi or the revolutions last year in the Middle East? 

Inner speech as right to speak

As a master’s student I was interested in Vygotsky’s notion of inner speech and how it eventually would manifest in outer speech. Because of their overlap, Bakhtin and Vygotsky were often read together. What I want to do here though is relate Bakhtin (and to the extent that I can, Vygotsky’s) idea of inner speech to what we studied in last week’s readings—the right to speak.

Let me start here. I was harsh when it came to Christine de Pizan. My main criticism of Pizan came from the idea that through her rhetoric she reinforced the power structures of the day—just with a different embodiment. As some of you pointed out in your response, I was being too hard on her. She did, after all, do something novel in a time when women simply did not have a voice. I still maintain that the voice she spoke with was not entirely hers.

The material words Pizan spoke with in the Bakhtinian sense belong to the greater social context—that of a male-dominated oligarchy. For Pizan to join the discourse (which I often remind myself that Bakhtin might refer to it as a dis-chorus), she needed to internalize the word of society created through the various pressures of heteroglossia and reflect and refract it to bring about a new reality—one in which women spoke (1211). According to Bakhtin’s logic this initial act of Pizan’s speaking the word opens the door for further discourse: “Even if a word is not entirely his, constituting, as it were, the border zone between himself and his addressee—still, it does in part belong to him” (1215). The border zone in Pizan’s case was more closely linked with her gender identity. While this remains an issue through the rest of the readings about right to speak, we also see the border zone grow on one side of the discourse to include “popular assemblies, the bar, and the pulpit.” The discourse could only progress that far through a heteroglossic dialogue wherein women borrowed the word, used it, made it their own, internalized it, redefined it, and spoke again. Eventually speech became less influenced by male hegemony, and giving rise to the voice of women rhetors.

We see this struggle between the inner voice in Woolf’s “Professions for Women” when she describes killing the angel. The struggle between her voice and that of the male-dominated society is nearly palpable when she says,

“[Y]ou cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all of these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must—to put it bluntly—tell lies if they are to succeed.” (1254)

I have to agree with Woolf. In order to gain access to the public, in order to have a voice, women had to acquiesce for a long time, starting with Pizan and making very gradual progress. And the progress came through “finding common ground” and very slowly moving that common ground. When it comes to Woolf’s time, the decision to speak or not rests with her—she has to decide to kill the angel. My question is, are we past this yet? To speak what angels are we killing? What about the academy—what do we do to keep other inner voices silent and what are the costs of letting them out? 

Write to speak

So I was going to do a video to emphasize what I am about to write, but a few things held me up—presenting at the Watson conference, re-reading the rules for our blogs, and finally the time it would take to script and film my little diatribe. ...I’ll come back to these things.

As we delve deeper into the history of writing, the power dynamics become more convoluted and more insidious. Last week we began to discuss the right to speak. This week I want to focus on the idea of write to speak. More than just a simple play on words, it seems that once folks like Douglass, Wells, and the Grimke sisters began to secure the right to speak there was a shift from seeing spoken discourse as publishing to hierarchy of discourses with spoken being merely a tool for delivery and the written as the thing that legitimizes the act. The end of Ferreira-Buckley’s chapter when she talks of the blue stockings foreshadows the rise of written culture and its dominance over the spoken tradition. As women gained their public voices, the only way to delegitimize those voices became to advantage written discourse.

While Mailloux focuses his essay on the dynamics that took place in the English department, I want to focus on the larger societal effects that divided speech and written rhetoric. At first the dominance of print over oral tradition could be argued in that print allowed for a much wider audience. With speaking only those within earshot at a particular moment could access the rhetoric. Put those same thoughts into print and the moment is extended and the audience is no longer locked in by geography (a case made in Eisenstein’s book). What’s curious about the split between speech and print is that it happens around the same time we start recording human voices. At first the thought might be that speech is becoming its own entity because of the technology. In this case though, I am arguing that the technology became a tool to relegate speech to lesser than rhetoric. Need a modern day equivalent? Look no further than the technology of the web (especially wikis and blogs) where “any idiot can have a voice.” Written discourse found ways to promote itself over the spoken. In Bordelon et al’s anecdote about women speaking in public, they describe females only being allowed to read in public. So women would stand with a book in hand and deliver their orations. The right to speak is granted by the written word even though the written word is no more than an entry ticket. Another example of refining who is allowed to speak comes from Blair’s notion of taste. (See my blog from last week.)

The temple of public discourse is well-guarded.

The schism of speech and writing led to, as Porter notes, the diminished importance of the audience. The listening kairotic audience becomes lost on writers once speech is separated from the English department. It’s a bridge we are still rebuilding if the Watson conference I attended is any evidence. Yes, there was a lot of great discussion (my favorite part of any panel is the end where everyone talks off the cuff); however, the papers, for the most part, are merely delivered (and think of the startling difference in Villanueva’s speech and colloquial discourse in the Octolog). Papers are read. This is how we make it in academia—by reading papers that frame themselves as discussions. The influence also seems to come down to a micro-level. In order to perform a video that would have me speaking to the camera I felt impressed to consult the rules for our blogs. Though I could twist the blog rules for my purposes, those words, “paper,” “notes,” and the explicit word count (though it could be spoken) made me think twice. (I really don’t think Jim would hold my feet to the fire on an audio post, but my reluctance to go outside of print comes from somewhere—as did my decision to consult the syllabus about how to portray my thoughts.) But perhaps even more telling is my immediate desire to script the performance. That, I decided, would make it legitimate. (It would also double the work I have to do with the writing, filming, editing and posting the video file.)

Are we moving past the point in academia when we tell people, “If you have something important to say, write it down”? How do the things that contribute toward tenure still betray our bias toward print over orality? And, of course I am wondering if English will ever again encompass speech or vis-versa (why not?). 

Industrial Revolution revisited

Given the amount of attention we paid to the invention of the printing press over the last two weeks, I have to say I am a bit taken aback by the lack of attention the Industrial Revolution receives in A Short History of Writing Instruction. Yes, I know the printing press was mainly discussed by Eisenstein’s book and far less by The Rhetorical Tradition and SHWI. That said, I have to employ Jameson’s idea of the political unconscious here—a move that examines the social, political and historical forces at play during this revolution. While there is no direct causal relationship in this revolution, the relationship between the materiality and society is far more complicated than described by SHWI.

            In the Short History the Industrial Revolution is most noted for making the materiality of literacy really cheap. The authors also note that the classrooms of the Industrial Revolution “asked students to demonstrate original contributions” (217). I have to take issue with this. Last spring I read Collins and Halverson’s Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology that examined the effect of the Industrial Revolution on classrooms in far more detail. The direct effect of the Industrial Revolution on the school system according to Halverson and Collins is that universal schooling became a thing—a notion not altogether foreign in this week’s readings (54-60). But more important than universal schooling is that the school system reflected the mechanization of society. (i.e We have students at their stations/desks performing tasks from rote memory a la the factory laborer.) The point of view afforded in Murphy’s book seems to gloss over the implications of the capitalist mentality that (yes, according to Fred Jameson) is symptomatic of the twentieth century. (And, in a separate argument I may posit that it is overlooked because Murphy & Co. are too invested in the capitalistic university system.)

            While I don’t see the effect of the Industrial Revolution stated outright in this week’s readings, I do see the implications manifesting elsewhere. Gold, Hobbs, and Berlin note the rise of Current-Traditional Rhetoric and its lack of attention to invention, and concern with style and arrangement “with instruction emphasizing the modes of discourse, clarity, and correctness” (237).  Like the mechanization described by Halverson and Collins, the Industrial Revolution takes writing from the more artful (something reclaimed by the expressivists in the 60s and 70s) to what Gold et al call “more objective scientific rhetoric” (237). This sort of divide between the perspicuity of Blair and the belletristic rhetorics and the romantic expressivists also creates class. In the former we have a working class—an industrialized workforce to produce the mechanized prose—while in the latter we have an artful class endowed with the gift of writing as an art form. I do not see them as one or the other—or as two competing schools of thought cropping up out of two distinct time periods. History is too interlinked and fluid for that. Rather, the revolutions work together through the unconscious to create what would ultimately plague the university system for the rest of the century—class conflict. 

It's my God-given right, if that's okay with you...

So who exactly gives the right to speak (or write, as the case may be)?

In the medieval ages, through the Renaissance, up through the Enlightenment, the right to speak seems to be God-given. Or maybe God-selected. As I continue to argue in nearly all of my blog posts, the power structure is the mediator of “God’s word.” This comes mostly in the form of the Church—an organization that gave Augustine his right to speak and limited de la Cruz’s right to speak. So maybe the right is God-given, but organizationally selected.

The invention of the printing press was a major blow to the power structure of the Church (hence a large part of Eisenstein’s argument). Much of the power of the Church derived from controlling holy text (from which laws and customs were drafted) and controlling the modes of production (since the most literate bunch around happened to be clergy). Just as the Church’s followership split with the advent of print in Lutheran Reformation, so did the ideology concerning the God-given right to speak. Those who still believed in a sacred text that could not be tainted by print continued to see the right to speak as something endowed solely by God—a principle reflected in the American notion of God-given rights. In this group I might include Maria Stewart’s verse-heavy Biblical rhetoric as well as the Grimke sisters’ more analytical readings of the Bible. The women here, like Pizan, rely on the power structure already in place: an organization of men using a male-dominated text. (And, in no way do a say this disparagingly; turning people’s own words on them is quite a talent.)

(I realize here that I am setting up a dichotomy.  This is somewhat intentional, as I want to show the two major ways I see people claiming their right to speak. For the record, the distance between the two views is less that I am making it out to be. As Stewart remarks, “All that man can say or do can never elevate us, it is a work that must be effected between God and ourselves” [1043]. Rather I am concerned with where people saw the right to speak originating.)

On the other side of my false dichotomy are the self-determined speakers like Wells and Douglass who seem to take up the idea of humanism. A most notable lingustic feature amongst this group is their acknowledgement of the “I.” Whereas the speakers who view their agency as being born of God rarely acknowledge themselves, Douglass makes his entire case on the use of I. The autobiography / slave narrative is a first-person-driven form of discourse meant to empower the speaker. [Aside: This is a common pedagogical issue faced by teachers when FYC students have an identity crisis of sorts, asking if they have the authority to refer to themselves as I in an essay. It sounds ridiculous until I look back at my Catholic High School upbringing and realize I was never allowed to use I.] Royster certainly puts Wells into the group of self-defined speakers when she says, “Wells looked closely at her life, named herself, claimed her own vision of reality, claimed her own authority to speak the truth she saw...” (173). Testimony from the Bible is, in this group’s case, more impactful than the Bible. (Again, this is reductive in the Hugh Blair way. We, of course, would also need to take into account audience, kairos, and delivery when differentiating these groups.)

Like I said, I don’t want to be too binary. The move of borrowing God’s ethos is a good one learned from centuries of people (like popes) doing so. Moreover, in prohibiting a person’s right to speak, the word of God is often used as justification (and still is, in the case of many social issues). But I also see this rhetorical move as the “common ground” move we first witnessed in de Pizan’s work and will see again in Rogerian argumentation. By meeting on the Bible—or God’s word (depending on whether you value text or oral tradition)—the speakers are finding a common source of agreement and building from there. 

Taste: the gentleman's discrimination

So literacy grows and everyone becomes equal. Reading is truly needed for access. It’s the key to success. Yay! Reading!

...So I’m going to go get my Dean Koontz on... Maybe some Janet Evonovich. Whatever they sell near the authentico Mexican food at Kroger.

What? That’s not scholarly of me. I have no taste? If I’m reading some paperback trashy thriller I must be some sort of muttonhead. How awful. How Hugh Blair.

Now I’m not going to completely blame Hugh here. Much of the blame can be shouldered by the capitalist mindset instilled in society since the beginning of beginnings. Rather I just want to make note of a trend that I’m brought up in several of my blogs (a lineage that goes back some 2,000 years now—the subject, not the blog). The trend is that language continues to grow and with each iteration some one or group tries to create a hierarchy where they can establish themselves at the top. It seems that universities are especially adept at doing this. Even BizBerg concedes there is a devaluation of common things in the classroom that persists even today (RT 948).

Taste according to Blair is “deeply founded in the human mind” and “it is no less essential to man to have some discernment of beauty, than it is to possess the attributes of reason and of speech” (955). So it is ingrained in our being as well as being essential. The claim Blair lays out on 957-8 is pretty much a catch-22: You can have taste, but it could be the wrong type (i.e. the “accuracy” he mentions on 958). The exact criteria for what is good taste versus bad taste is not exactly illustrated (though it is “reduced” by Blair to delicacy and correctness on 957).

Like I said, it’s not the idea of taste that I want to note here as problematic as it is. BizBerg notes that the eighteenth century saw the rise of private and public school systems—a divide that implies a Blairesque idea of taste. The idea is repeated (as I plan to outline in my next blogpost) in the right to speak—a key question being if someone has taste or social class or a penis. Or all of the above. Taste, because the literacy playing field had been leveled by the printing press, is now the grand decider of social class.

Now I’m interested in how this is reflected in today’s structures. Taste, despite Blair’s claim, is too arbitrary. Schools still define themselves and their students in terms of class. Materiality, as Ferreira-Buckley points out, is still a major factor in the production and ownership of texts (183)—a force that will surely only amplfy and complicate as we work our way into the 20^th century. Perhaps is the divide of class in terms of education nowhere more obvious than when Ferreira-Buckley describes the schooling of nobles in England. When the English nobility is put into conversation with the Scottish university that admitted all the talented folk (194), it’s hard not to wonder who Blair would say had taste.  

Science, religion, and publicity

The Enlightenment seems to be mostly about the formation of communication systems (the same systems that not much later just become extensions of the Medieval systems of power). Here I am defining system broadly—a network formed by affinity spaces essentially (to borrow from games scholar James Gee). As Bizzel and Herzberg note in their introduction to John Locke “complex ideas are formed by the connections among simple ideas” (815). While this is just a network of thought, it’s the connections that fascinate me. Locke, Vico, and the scientists of the Enlightenment are concerned with connecting and synthesizing their thoughts through language and reflection. In networking these thoughts, new ideas are derived at through synthesis.  

             I guess what I’m concerned with here is relating (networking) the larger societal movements with the ones going on in the heads of the Enlightenment folks. As print became a dominant force, it would be easy to paint the Enlightenment as a panacea of shared knowledge—a lofty notion Ortelius floats when devising his atlas (Eisenstein, 85). But the connections between ideas effect more than knowledge. Eisenstein notes that the advent of print brought “together intellectual and commercial activities which reinforced each other and thus created an especially powerful, almost irresistible drive” (75). The result is aptly described as “a knowledge explosion” (83)—a term fitting something that happens so quickly and has so much potential to clear a path or destroy or both. Print created new relationships which I examine here in the next paragraph; however, print itself became a system that muddied how we arrive at truth. For science and religion—two systems engaged in the pursuit of Truth—print acted for and against them.

            In the later chapters of Eisenstein’s book, she notes how print put religion into conversation with science. The relationship, despite some commonly-held beliefs, was not entirely antagonistic. Some science set out to “prove” or build onto religious ideas. Eisenstein poetically refers to this as “spreading God’s words” versus “deciphering His handiwork” (298). Scientific notions could be shared through dessemination, negating the need for the “wandering scholar” (47). On a darker note, print also facilitated the “output of polemical tracts to sway opinion,” a key tactic used by both the Catholic and Protestant Churches.  What I see here is the first effective use of propaganda. (Yes, there had been smearing and rumor before, but the ethos print lends itself to ideas like “popular opinion” and “news” in ways orality could not.) And with the dawn of new media and propaganda (now an old idea), we have the formation of publicity. Venues for certain types of print become reconsidered, much like Luther’s tacking of theses to a church door (168). Probably most significant though is the “deliberate exploitation of the new medium” (170).

            Toward the end of her book, Eisenstein explicitly notes the impact of publicity on science and religion as well as the effect it had on the relationship between the two systems. As the Churches grew accustomed and adept to print publicity, science begins to distrust it. The very thing that put ideas in conversation becomes something to be feared (298). Repeatedly, Eisenstein uses the word paradox in describing the print revolution, another fitting term. Perhaps most paradoxically is the idea she advances early in the book—that “printers not only compete with rivals and improve on their predecessors. They are able to improve on themselves” (81). The networking allows for advancement. Yet, the network formed with and by economies stymies pure growth while being stimulated. (i.e. The idea that the second edition could improve on the first—a way of sandbagging knowledge. Ahem, textbooks...) 

Reading (con)text metatextually

James Gee describes a classroom activity wherein he has students write down the tools they associate with work. When the students are finished, they examine what the tools say about their conceptions of work and how this speaks to social class and personal history. I couldn’t help but think of Gee’s exercise when reading about the type of work modern authors do in relation to the work of the first printers.

Let me take a step back from the previous paragraph for a second and note how intrinsically linked our notion of language is to life. (And life/death, it seems, is really what text is all about [Ong, 81].) I use the word describes to relate an activity. In a more literal (hence less linguistically abstract) reading of the word, we see a (re)mediation of scribe—a turning from action to text and text-into-action. But later, I use the words say and speaks to convey what students wrote and were thinking (and here we should also note the tense changes). And even now, in this paragraph I note the appropriations of these words. Let us just agree that any puns involving the interplay between the constructed word and its abstract meaning are, at once, entirely accidental now, but intentional at one point[1] in time.

The tools of the trade for the first printers[2] dictated[3] their roles in the work of reproducing[4] texts. As Eisenstein writes, “Even before a given reference work had come off the press, fruitful encounters between typefounders, correctors, translators... and others engaged in editorial work had already occurred” (49). These sorts of meetings and interactions, Eisenstein comes to term as “combinatory activity” (49). Indeed, the combined knowledge as well as the power dynamics created by putting these forces in conversation[5], leads[6] to even the singularly-authored[7] text as a collaborative piece.[8]

            Because the human element is always at play in interpretation, copying, and producing, the language within a text is never truly dead as Plato might have feared. The written word continues to live because it is reproduced/is a product of a system based in materiality. The material might shift though. And I mean shift in the most textual of senses (i.e. pressing the “shift” key). Plato describes transcending as meaning is made into Meaning. Perhaps as the word is recopied and its Meaning is lost, but we come to understand it in its new heteroglossic context as Word with meaning(s)—its context enveloped around it. This is why transcendence is unachievable—because we are being torn (like a sheet of paper) between two realities: one based in materiality, the other based in time.

            Eisenstein traces the notion of textual corruption to its liveliness—the perishability of its material components and the flexible contexts of interpretation and reproduction (87). The following sentence is my own spin on Eisenstein’s idea as I act as scribe to reproduce the idea she stole and claim it as my own Words. As paper dies, the text has to live. Once text becomes cemented (like the initials I carved into the sidewalk where I grew up), it is as dead as my childhood. Again, we see/read/experience/interpret/whatever that at once we are constrained by the material, yet the material pushes us to move beyond it. The point[9] is that we can look[10] behind[11] the text to more accurately read what the (con)text is saying.

---

[1] A point being, of course, one twelfth of a pica. The text here in Word is twelve point. If you multiply, you can get the product in picas (or see—by which I mean read—footnote 4). I have no idea if Blogger will convert the text into a different type and make it a product of their own design. I should also note that a point, mathematically speaking is plotted out as a dot (.), the same mark used to end a sentence.

[2] By printers, I mean, the people, not the machines. Though, as I note in a posthumanist move, there isn’t much difference between the two in footnote 3. More interestingly is the use of the brand name Xerox to identify paper photocopies from scanned copies. 

[3] And here/hear I have a word that describes the didactic action that we commonly associate with power—the author speaking her manuscript to a lowly assistant who performs the function of writing it down (as a scribe). Yet, the players in my example are mechanical and people-as-defined-by-their-machines. Maybe these are the conversations I describe—ha!—in footnote number 5. (And I have to wonder as I move this text from Word to Blogger if "footnote" is really the correct term or if I need to change it as I act as the printer/poster [poster still being a term derives from print culture] [see footnote 2]).

[4] Because the product (a mathematical term describing—that word again!—the final number arrived at in a multiplication equation) is really what happens when we combine and multiply work forces.

[5] Conversation is a common trope in academia when two texts by long-dead authors are juxtaposed by a living party. These conversations are said to produce insight. 

[6] And the leading required between single-spaced lines like this is typically 13 points.

[7] That is, a text where a single person is the authority. 

[8] And now I’ve juxtaposed “text” (typically seen as a whole) with “piece” which insinuates that it is merely a part of something bigger. I hope that putting these two words in conversation produces some insight. 

[9] In the non-pica sense.

[10] By which I mean “read into” as opposed to reading over or looking up. Maybe a vision that looks deeply--like "insight!"--would best describe what I am hoping to say here.

[11] And by “looking behind the text” to discover meaning, I am unintentionally referring to looking in the back of the book at the meaningful indexes of glossaries and appendices. Or it could mean a footnote. I guess it depends on the sort of reading material you’re working with.