- Apr 2017
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The belief that grammatical categoriesreflect the underlying structure of the world is a continuing seductivehabit of mind worth questioning.
Can this be read against Cixous' call for l'ecriture feminine as it has the potential to subvert the "underlying structures" of phallocentiric language (particularly as feminists would later view her arguments to be too essentializing)?
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contestation
There's something really interesting about her use of the word "contestation" ("the action or process of disputing or arguing"). It seems to add to the "performance as a process" idea. This word seems to imply something more active and continuous rather than just saying "I'm against language determining what is real."
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matter
And not just "matter" in it a subjective relation to humans? In other words, matter only matters as long as humans can describe it, own it, etc...?
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Indeed, through posthumanism, rhetoric becomes an art of connectivityand thereby asks for new considerations from multiple angl
Going all the way back to the first week's Muckelbauer reading, "Returns of the Question" seemed to be working with this "art of connectivity":
And while it seems necessary that this crisis return, it is also the case that our contemporary milieu simultaneously invites us to encounter our disciplinary identity crisis less as a crisis of identity and more as an opening of alterity.
In some ways, this reading more explicitly gets at the frustration with "never finally answering the question," as his answer was along the lines of "It depends."
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simulacrum
Definition: An image or representation of someone or something.
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assuming, of course, that a “situation” can be circum-scribed
BITZER! VATZ!
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elsewhere
This seems to align with Rickert's and Edbauer's takes on the "rhetorical situation" as not just about an autonomous human agent engaging with finite "situations." Instead, there are interconnected humans, environments, publics, etc., which are never totally in control, but always calibrating/attuning in certain (if brief) moments on their way toward something else.
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onethatseestheambientenvironmentintermsofarobustinteractionthatfolds-andinfolding,dissolves-subjectivitywithinit.
This feels like a trap I'm setting for myself, but....
So, would objectivity also be "dissolved" into the ambient environment as well? I know this plays on the subjective/objective binary, but if we are to believe in Rickert's kairotic muddle (which is great BTW) it all has to be folded in, right?
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Thesoundofsound
This is great. By saying that "sound has a sound" challenges the notion of sound as an isolated or objective thing. The only reason a sound sounds is because it has a sound.
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butthecreativelocusisdeliveredovertotheenvironment
The wording here is a bit confusing for me (as "delivered over" makes me think there's a certain objectivity to the "creative locus"), but what I think he's saying is that the environment itself is a creative force we only up until recently confined to the realm of "human." In turn, this means the technology, rather than the human, is the rhetorical agent working through an ambient environment.
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Inaddition,ithasmuchtosaytorhetoricaltheoriesofcomposing,specificallyaboutthegenesisandcompositionofaworkas,literally,akindof"takingplace."Thisphrase,acommonplacelocutionforanevent,capturesthesensethatsomethingishappening,butdoessobymeansofaliteralizedspatialincarnation:theconditionsofa"happening"arealreadyinscribedinaplace.
Like Edbauer, Rickert connects rhetoric to place -- locations work rhetorically, and communication happens in and through those places.
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Inthissense,networkculturesignifies"overconnection,"akinto"overdetermination,"inwhichamultiplicityofconnectionsarealwaysongoingandinteractive,andnoneofwhichcanbesaidtobeprimary
Is this much different than Edbauer's use of "concatenation" as it might mean interconnectedness? I think the word itself -- concatenation -- might seem to imply a more linear "series-ness" than Rickert... But I really don't think Edbauer, and definitely not Rickert, mean linearity in that way (as it pertains to closure).
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Inthissecondsense,the"place"oftherhetoristhatregionorfieldmarkedbythepartic-ularitiesofpersons,acts,andagenciesinwhichtherhetordis-closesandestablishesmeaningfulrelationships
And Anzaldúa's "topic" and "place" is the borderlands rather than clearly marked and separated realms (?).
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Iftherhetorbecomesmasterofthisart,hewillbeabletostructurenovelandindeterminatesituationssuchthatfruitfulissues"emerge"ineach.Hewillpossessatruly"universal"powerorcapacitytofunctioninthevariousrhetoricalsituationswhichconstantlyarise
This is all feeling very Hume-ish, particularly as Consigny says some rhetors can learn an art of rhetoric more than others just based upon either familiarity (practice) or chance.
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antinomy
Definition: A contradiction between two beliefs or conclusions that are in themselves reasonable; a paradox.
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solutions
So is there like a flow chart for this.... or a choose-your-own-adventure book... ???
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gestalt
Definition: An organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts.
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Therivalformulationsarethemselvespartoftheincoherentsituation,andtherhetor'staskisnottosimplyadoptanalterna-tive"position,"butrathertodiscoverwhatpositiontoadoptbymakingsenseofthesituationalincoherencies
Is this part of what Vatz calls "arbitration"?
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he terministie lens of conglomerated clements,
Which would be that "text as object" assumption Biesecker wants to move away from?
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stretches
sophist_monster, is this a vertical or horizontal stretch? OR MULTI-DIRECTIONAL???
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rhetoricity
When I get to Rickert's reading for this week, I'm sure this will come up again... But, Rickert also used this term in "Rhetorical Prehistory and the Paleolithic," which Nathaniel explained there:
...A big term in rhetorical studies now is rhetoricity. Folks using this term are trying to get away from humanists frameworks that see rhetoric as a discursive act of autonomous and rational human agents. That is, rhetoric is not simply something we do but rather a complex assemblage that we participate in...
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Thus,thepowerofrheto-riciscircumscribed:ithasthepotencytoinfluenceanaudience,torealigntheirallegiances,butnottoformnewidentities
Sounds very Corder-ish.
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Weltanschauung
Weltanschauung: world view, philosophy of life.
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The very choice of what facts or events are relevant is amatter of pure arbitration.
Much of this section could also be useful in thinking through Bitzer's statement that "The scientific audience consists of persons capable of receiving knowledge, and the poetic audience, of persons capable of participating in aesthetic experiences induced by the poetry" (8). To assert that particular audiences are not concerned with values is dangerous territory according to Burke, Booth, etc.
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Anexigencewhichcannotbemodifiedisnotrhetorical;thus,whatevercomesaboutofnecessityandcannotbechanged-death,winter,an~•somenaturaldisasters,forinstance-areexigencestobesure,.buttheyarenotrhetoric{i
It feels like a blurry line he's drawing here. I wonder if these exigences really don't involve some type of rhetorical situation, as events such as these don't exist in a vacuum (many natural disasters are a part of the larger climate change discussions, not to mention responses to such things). Dividing environmental exigences like air pollution and natural disasters seems trickier than he's leading us to believe here, more so than just saying one is capable of "positive modification" and the other is not.
Edit: As I'm reading through Vatz, he offers some clarification of this part: "Bitzer adds that the situation is rhetorical only if something can be done, but apparently it is only rhetorical also if something should be done" (156).
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Thescientificaudienceconsistsofper-sonscapableofreceivingknowledge
I think Campbell, Nietzsche, Burke, and Booth (just to name a few) would disagree with this.
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Inthissenserhetoricisalwayspersuasive.
I'm not sure if this goes here, because I'm kind of pulling from some parts all around this... Is rhetorical situation not equated with a persuasive situation (3) because "...not persuasive intent, but the situation is the source and ground of rhetorical activity" (6). Or, rhetorical situation is not totally bound up in persuasive intent, distinguishing it from a general persuasive situation?
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Eachreader
Kairos?
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Few other selections could have been so dramatic, or so meaningful. We are witnessing here a profound disruption at the level of the sig-nifier, precisely because of the relationship of identity that obtains between the two apparently equivalent terms.
To signif(y) is not just to join a term with a concept (a process between words and things), but to join a term with a concept in social and political settings (a process between words and things within particular circumstances).
This added component of the "playfulness" of language ("rhetorical games" as he says on the next page) amps up the embodied significance of Gates' argument. He calls them "games," but not in the sense that Derrida might suggest. Someone like Derrida can talk abstractly about language "play" because his bodily presence is of little concern in the larger scheme of speaker/audience interactions. Gates, though, makes it clear that, for speakers of Black English, there are very real material interactions (and consequences) at play and at stake.
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Abrahams's work helps us to understand that Signifyin(g) is an adult ritual, which black people learn as adolescents, almost exactly like children learned the traditional figures of signification in classically structured Western primary and sec-ondary schools, training one hopes shall be re-turned to contemporary education.
I've been thinking a lot about the weak vs strong defense throughout this entire reading -- both the process of learning to Signify, as well as Signifyin(g) itself kind of muddles that binary. It's not as simple as using ornamental language for good or bad purposes, but it's also not quite questioning value judgments altogether (of course, though, this reading does serve to dispel assumptions we make about the purpose and/or correctness of language).
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An article printed in the New York Times on April r7, 1983, entitled "Test on Street Language Says It's Not Grant in That Tomb,"
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The question reads, "Who is buried in Grant's tomb?" The proper response to this question is. "Your mama."
This is amazing.
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In this sense, one does not signify something; rather, one signifies in some way.
The style is the argument?
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f Esu-Elegbara' stands as the central figure of the Ifa system of interpretation,2 then his Afro-Ameri-can relative, the Signifying Monkey, stands as the
Gates decenters the Western tradition by providing an alternative point of rhetorical origins (or lineage?) as a "functional equivalency as figured of rhetorical strategies and of interpretation" (1558). What connections can we make to Rickert here? And what are the limits to those connections?
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palimpsest
Definition: A manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing.
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This arbitrary and idiosyncratic conven-tion also enables me to recall the fact that what-ever historical community of Afro-Americans coined this usage did so in the vernacular as spo-ken, in contradistinction to the literate written us-ages of the standard English "shadowed" term.
This seems to overturn Derrida's emphasis on written words as the place for (white) linguistic study.
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n the extraordinarily complex relationship between the two homonyms, we both enact and recapitulate the received, classic confrontation between Afro-American culture and American culture.
Gates is criticized from both sides -- he's too establishmentarian for the Left (Harvard, ugh), too radical for the right (don't mess with the canon!). As the readings from the past few weeks indicate, investigating that binary is the work of postmodernism. Gates follows up on those inquiries by situating "Black English [as] a fertile field for studying the ideological and epistemological powers of rhetoric" (1544).
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Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Do you guys remember the beer summit after Gates was arrested while entering his own house?
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Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else.
A resource?
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I sit here before my computer,
This image is a bit jarring for me, but in a good way. It brings me back to the material nature of writing beyond embodiment (but nonetheless spiritually or mystically transformative).
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Ethnocentrism is the tyranny of Western aes-thetics. An Indian mask in an American museum is transposed into an alien aesthetic system where what is missing is the presence of power invoked through performance ritual. It has become a con-quered thing, a dead "thing" separated from na-ture and, therefore, its power.
It's also important to think about where these objects are typically placed in museums -- peripheral, hard to find places people typically don't take the time to go -- so that they can make room for the Western painters she speaks of below.
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Andrea Lunsford has called this mixed discourse a "mestiza rhetoric," with "mestiza" referring not only to the specific racial and cultural mixing that has produced the Mexican American people, but also to a more generalized concept of internal multiplicity, or complex identity, that is expressed in language drawn from a variety of cultural sources.
"Mestiza" is translated as "A woman of mixed race, especially the offspring of a Spaniard and an American Indian."
This is different from a term later used, "mestizaje" ("mestizaje écriture") which is translated as "Interbreeding and cultural intermixing of Spanish and American Indian people (originally in Mexico, and subsequently also in other parts of Latin America); miscegenation, racial and cultural intermixing."
I feel like the usage of these two terms does something to the rhetoric/embodiment discussion we've got going, but I'm not quite sure what....
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I have so internalized the borderland con-flict that sometimes I feel like one cancels out the other and we are zero, nothing, no one.
Here is another connection I think we can make back to Cixous, and her insistence that a woman is not simply "undifferentiated magma," a "zero, nothing, no one" waiting to be molded or formed into Burke's A or non-A. Here, Anzaldúa strains that metaphor a bit more, challenging the process of assimilation as it pertains to the US "melting pot" mentality. We can't just "melt down" our identities to be reformed as part of the dominating culture.
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ecause we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally crucified.
How can we make connections all the way back to Palmer's "Tongue of Fire on the Daughters of the Lord"? Anzaldúa opens up Palmer's critique of silencing women to a more diverse population, but what does Borderlands/La Frontera offer politically?
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Chicano Spanish is not incorrect, it is a living language.
This is directly related to Gates' arguments, which takes on the assumption that Black English is "disorganized" or "incorrect Standard English." Language subordination happens at all levels and in all cultures.
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Helene Cixous
And, if you want to dig a bit deeper, you'll find that disability studies scholar Jay Dolmage brings Cixous and Anzaldúa together in his article "Metis, Mêtis, Mestiza, Medusa: Rhetorical Bodies Across Rhetorical Traditions."
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- Mar 2017
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the debate has been particularly acrimonious because the area of contest-science and its procedures-is so heavily invested in as the one place where the apostles of rhetorical interpretivism would pre-sumably fear to tread.
Just like a serious man.
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In Richard Lanham's helpful terms, it is a disagreement as to whether we are members of the species homo seriosus or homo rhetoricus.
How closely can we align Nietzsche's rational man and intuitive man to these descriptions?
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as good as you're going to get
Have you ever actually thought about the cover image chosen for this movie?
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will cease to be a danger either to themselves or to those who hearken to them.
Violence.
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penumbra
Definitions: the partially shaded outer region of the shadow cast by an opaque object; a peripheral or indeterminate area or group.
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Whether the center of that vision is a personal-ized deity or an abstract geometric reason, rhetoric is the force that pulls us away from that center and into its own world of ever-shifting shapes and shimmering surfaces.
Rhetoric is not only a force, but also a (dynamic) place.
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As a defense, however, this declaration has the disadvantage of implying the superfluousness of rhetoric, an implication fully realized in Augustine's On Christian Doctrine where eloquence is so much subordinated to wis-dom that it disappears as a distinct and separable property.
Would you say that it is...weak...?
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Except in the artificial en-vironment of a college seminar, all speech is rhetorical or instrumental, intended to accomplish something.
A statement like this would be interesting to revisit as we encounter more and more anecdotes about the consequences of these "of course" moments in the classroom (for both students and instructors).
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In my mind, this means that the burden of argument is upon the ethos of the arguer. Ethos, of course, is a term still poorly understood
This feels a lot Burke's concept of "identification," which pushed the traditionally conceived ethos (establishing credibility/authority) toward consubstantiality (establishing a relationship).
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argument doesn't exist except as it is composed and that the "act of composi- tion can never end," as Doctorow has said
"Invention always occurs" (17).
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hearers
The parenthetical nature of this comment (opposite Cixous?) seems to undercut his entire argument. To love is to listen, too. RIGHT?
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commodious
Definition: comfortably or conveniently spacious.
This word choice is definitely on point here given the bodily implications of his argument -- we must make literal space for other bodies in the process of arguing (living).
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That is display and presentation
That is arrangement.
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ow can we take that one chance I mentioned just now and learn to change when change is to be cherished? How can we expect another to change when we are ourselves that other's contending narrative?
So much of this reading reminds me of Booth. How do we know when we should call for change? And how do we know that it is not us that should change?
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This means that invention always occurs
We've come a long way since the days of "invention belongs to science, not rhetoric."
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We see only what our eyes will let us see at a given moment, but eventually make a narrative of ourselves that we can enjoy, tolerate, or at least not have to think about too much
Memory plays tricks on the narratives we write and share.
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If it is good for men to at-tend to each other's reasons-and we all know that it is, because without such attending none of us could come to be and questions about value could not even be asked-it is also good to work for whatever conditions make such mutual inquiry possible. Whatever imposes belief with-out personal engagement becomes inferior to whatever makes mutual exchange more likely.
Act One of this This American Life episode spends some time talking about this idea -- how do we "change people's minds" through personal engagement (although, I understand Booth is also questioning if/when we should even be concerned with "changing minds").
Also, the fact that this was a "redo" of the study because the first one was falsified really speaks to Booth's lecture.
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We will follow the same rule. Needless to say, the various fanatical defenders of nonsense or viciousness, even if backed by millions of SS troops, cannot claim that kind of support.
Burke also warns against scientism's "universal appeal" in his Rhetoric. The anonymity of science, coupled with the belief that science is good because it gets us closer to universally accepted truths, is one of the tools of genocide.
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he rest of us finding other rhetori-cal communities that will differ from problem to problem, discipline to discipline, political and so-cial need to political and social need. If we can find some way to rely on our common sense-what we "sense" and know in common-we can once again trust whatever standards of validation our reasonings together lead us to.
Values are created through a community's discourse. But, as we've discussed before, that's a messy process. We don't come to know "common sense" as easily as scientism would have us believe.
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like Chaim Perelman (whom he cites several times)
It might be important to think back to Perlelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric. When we read that, Nathaniel pointed out their use of "combat":
We combat uncompromising and irreducible philosophical oppositions presented by all kinds of absolutism...
Throughout Booth's lecture here, he is taking on the belief that one day science could take over and explain everything if only we could get that pesky subjectivity out of the way (such as his statement on "warring preferences" on page 1494). So, while theorists like Richards say we should get rid of the "combative impulse," Booth expands Perelman's ideas that it's not the combat that is bad; it's how we think it ends with winning vs. losing that is the problem. (This is also directly related to his thoughts on diplomacy and compromise on the previous page.)
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No scientist has ever performed experiments or calculations pro-viding more than a tiny fraction of all the scien-tific beliefs he holds; the whole edifice of science depends on faith in witnesses, past and present
George Campbell takes a similar stance on scientific reasoning. In The Philosophy of Rhetoric he says that even scientific evidence relies on both the memory of previous knowledge and faith that previous knowledge still holds ups (pages 921-3).
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But unlike skillful diplomats, rhetorologists do not just try to discover the rival basic commitments and then "bargain." Nor do they just tolerate, in a spirit of benign relativism. Instead, they search together for true grounds, then labor to decide how those grounds dictate a change of mind about more superficial beliefs. Any genuine rhetorologist entering any fray is committed to the possibility of conversion to the "enemy" camp.
Rhetoric's consubstantiality means that you just might move a little over to the other side. This is real compromise (not compromise based upon the "what's the bare minimum I can give up to get what I want?").
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margins
Can we make any connections between this whole section (which is really difficult for me to understand, but also feels important to my own interests in interdisciplinarity, error, and disability) this statement from Cixous?
Giving isn't sacrificing. The person who transmits has to be able to function on the level of knowledge without knowing. I'm not at all referring to Socrates now. Just that one should be in a state of weakness, as we all are, and that it be evident. That one have the guts to occupy the position one has no right to occupy and that one show precisely how and why one occupies it. I set my sights high: I demand that love struggle within the master against the will for power.
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teratology
Definition: the study of malformations or serious deviations from the normal type in developing organisms
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I know that I will be told: "But you are speak-ing there of the author as he is reinvented after the event by criticism, after he is dead and there ii. nothing left except for a tangled mass of scrib-blings;
Foucault would write "What is an Author?" a few years after this, which basically says this exact same thing; an author is the ideological myth we make out of the "cult of personality."
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Reduplication
The "re" on this feels a bit redundant. Isn't a duplication already a "re"making of something? Oh, linguistics...
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syntagma
Also see this Wiktionary page for etymology and additional definitions.
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surgical techniques
The nineteenth century was when the great anesthesia debate occurred, when doctors argued if it was safe and/or ethical to knock out a patient for surgery. Of course they were concerned about suffocation. But, doctors preferred not to use it more so to hear patients' screams. Without screaming, you'd never know if they were still alive.
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Such a history of the referent is no doubt possible; and I have no wish at the outset to ex-clude any effort to uncover and free these "pre-discursive" experiences from the tyranny of the text.
This paragraph sets up Foucault's metaphorical definition of "archeology." Traditionally, "archeology" uses site excavation and artifact analysis as a historical inquiry -- what does a site contain and what can an artifact say about human meaning/creation?
Here, Foucault says that kind of excavation isn't what he's interested in (even though he says it's not totally useless). Or, he's less interested in the sites and artifacts as they might say something about how humans created them or how humans created meaning through them. Instead, he wants to investigate how sites (normative discourses or cultural rules) create artifacts (objects or meaning, particularly in the "will to truth" way).
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But all this attention to the speech of madness does not prove that the old division is no longer operative. You have only to think of the whole framework of knowledge through which we decipher that speech, and of the whole network of institutions which permit someone-a doctor or a psychoan-alyst-to listen to it, and which at the same time permit the patient to bring along his poor words or, in desperation, to withhold them. You have only to think of all this to become suspicious that the division, far from being effaced, is working differently along other lines, through new institu-tions, and with effects that are not at all the same.
Jay Dolmage's Disability Rhetoric has a great interchapter, "Archive and Anatomy of Disability Myths," in which he breaks down some "representational systems" of disability. The division Foucault describes here, suppressed vs praised disability, are just two among Dolmage's much more complicated network of cultural discourses that create an object out of the disabled body.
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the institution's reply is ironic,
Ironic because the institution wants "beginnings" to be commemorated, but then quickly criticizes them?
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Let us generalize: in the nineteenth century, psychiatric discourse is characterized not by privileged objects, but by the way in which it forms objects that are in fact highly dispersed. This formation is made possible by a group of re-lations established between authorities of emer-gence, delimitation, and specification.
Mental illness is not an object waiting for identification and naming. Instead, it is a synthesis of normative discourses -- medical, judicial, etc. -- that come together to define "mental illness." In other words, objects (even mental illness) are not outside of reality but formed through relationships ("The Formation of Objects," duh).
It feels like what he's describing thus far is Nietzsche's concept of "truth" as a misperceived emergence from a hidden web of lies (metaphors).
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He begins by discussing historiography and the dangers of easy assumptions about the continuity of the development of ideas.
I think I've mentioned this in a previous reading (can't remember which one), but this is alluding to his specific use of episteme in The Order of Things. For Foucault, epistemes are the pervasive (and hidden) epistemological paradigms of a particular era. What's important to note with Foucault's notion of epistemes is that he uses it to identify ruptures between eras in order to challenge an ethic of progress so often promoted in historical accounts.
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That one have the guts to occupy the position one has no right to occupy and that one show precisely how and why one occupies it.
This seems necessary for Muckelbauer's suggested "ontological rhetoric" and/or the "opening of alterity" in "Returns of the Question." The ability to shift between disciplines, concepts, etc. is to move through rhetoric rather than master it.
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So you never will know that there is no law and no mastery. That there is no master. The paradox of mastery is that it is made up of a sort of complex ideological secretion produced by an infinite quantity of doorkeepers.
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
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Men
Sally Miller Gearhart's (highly contested) "The Womanization of Rhetoric" (1979) takes on the conquest and conversion models of rhetoric in a similar way.
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This doesn't mean that she's an undifferenti-ated magma, but that she doesn't lord it over her body or her desire. Though masculine sexuality gravitates around the penis, engendering that centralized body (in political anatomy) under the dictatorship of its parts, woman does not bring about the same regionalization which serves the couple head/genitals and which is inscribed only within boundaries. Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide.
Going back to Burke:
Distinctions, we might say, arise out of a great central moltenness, where all is merged. They have been thrown from a liquid center to the surface, where they have congealed. Let one of these crusted distinctions return to its source, and in this alchemic center it may be remade, again becoming molten liquid, and may enter into new combinations, whereat it may be again thrown forth as a new crust, a different distinction. So that A may become non-A. But not merely by a leap from one state to the other. Rather, we must take A back into the ground of its existence, the logical substance that is its causal ancestor, and on to a point where it is consubstantial with non-A; then we may return, this time emerging with non-A instead. (1300)
As I mentioned in an annotation there, I find the overlaps of this molten rock metaphor intriguing. Burke is using the metaphor as a means to understand ambiguity as a resource -- that every distinct word/idea/meaning can be melted down to an original substance and re-emerge as another. A can become non-A and vice versa because they both come from an undifferentiated molten source and can be reconfigured (hardened) in varied forms.
Cixous strains that metaphor here, touching upon the implications of distinguishing between A and non-A. In historical terms of sex, male is A, female is non-A. One is whole; the other, without the phallus, is incomplete. This is particularly important with Cixous' interest in psychoanalysis. Medusa is the embodiment of non-A -- deformed, monstrous, and eventually decapitated. But throughout this essay, Cixous argues that the female is not simply non-A marked by a lacking or absence. Even though Burke says that non-A can be molten back down to re-emerge as A and vice versa, Cixous suggests that continues to empower the concept of A still outside the realm of womanhood. Even with consubstantiality in mind, describing things as "with" and "without" implies a certain (bodily) violence.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that Cixous suggests we need to work on these metaphors a bit before coming to any conclusions about ambiguity and language as they pertain to gender (and, of course, there's a lot to be said about the boundaries and definitions of sex and gender here, too...). She wants to challenge the binary even more.
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are both untenable
There's a (superficial) simplicity to this reading, especially in paragraphs like these that suggest, "You know all of that stuff they said in the Enlightenment? Not possible. You know why? COMMUNITY."
I'm interested in how this helps us rethink the recent increase in the use of terms like "community." So often we hear vague generalizations like "this is for the community" or "they don't care about the community." What authors like Perelman and Nietzsche point out is that "community" is not just a unified whole, but a messy and entangled process of communication.
In this sense, "community" becomes ambiguous. Dictionar-ily defined, it might mean "A group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common" or "The condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common." But how they create "particular" or "common" characteristics, or how they "share attitudes and interests" is not a clear-cut process of truth finding and value defining.
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Those who hold facts and truths to be the sole norms for guiding opinions will endeavor to at-tach their convictions to some form of evidence that is indubitable and beyond discussion.
Willard might be interesting to bring in here. The "indubitable evidence" she argues against is based on male-dominated exegesis practices. She suggests that we should detach ourselves from that supposed set-in-stone evidence and open the discussion back up to women preaching.
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The idea of the universal audience has frequently been misunder-stood:
The break down of audiences in George Campbell's The Philosophy of Rhetoric seems to be the best example of this type of "misunderstanding." He spends a long time on "Chapter VII: Of the consideration which the Speaker ought to have of the Hearers, as men in general"(923-936), but then spends very little time on "Chapter VIII: Of the consideration which the Speaker ought to have of the Hearers, as such men in particular" (936-7). I think Perelman would argue that Chapter VII is of very-little-to-no use.
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like
Not quite sure how this got here. What is the actual connection to the body?
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bodies
While Locke is no doubt influenced by Cartesian dualism, which seems based upon the frequency of bodily failure, he seems to reject this idea (that the body is naturally or frequently in error).
See chapter 4 of Dalia Judovitz's The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity.
She closely reads Descartes' Meditations on the First Philosophy with special attention to the theological turn in Descartes' ontology. She spends the chapter considering how his claims that "the existence of God and the distinction between the mind and the body" are "underlain by the haunting invocation and recurrent appearance of errant, spectral, and mechanical bodies" (83).
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The anonymous and autonomous functions of the body
See Drew Leder's The Absent Body.
There might be some really fascinating intersections with his phenomenological investigation of disembodiment.
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Vitruvian Man
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nature
Words having naturally no signification, the idea which each stands for must be learned and retained, by those who would exchange thoughts, and hold intelligible discourse with others, in any language. But this is the hardest to be done where,
First, The ideas they stand for are very complex, and made up of a great number of ideas put together.
Secondly, Where the ideas they stand for have no certain connection in nature; and so no settled standard anywhere in nature existing, to rectify and adjust them by.
Thirdly, When the signification of the word is referred to a standard, which standard is not easy to be know.
Fourthly, Where the signification of the world and the real essence of the thing are not exactly the same.
These are difficulties that attend the signification of several words that are intelligible. Those which are not intelligible at all, such as names standing for any simple ideas which another has not organs of faculties to attain; as the names of colours to a blind man, or sounds to a deaf man, need not here be mentioned.
In all these cases we shall find an imperfection in words; which I shall more at large explain, in their particular application to our several sorts of ideas: for if we examine them, we shall find that the names of mixed modes are most liable to doubtfulness and imperfection, for the two first of these reasons; and the names of substances chiefly for the two latter. (818)
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rhetoric
Again, from the MicroResponse:
Thus there is a social aspect here as well, which is one of the ways that taste isrhetorical – it is a product of the dynamic relationship between the self and the world
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fiction
In "The Letter Killeth" Frances Willard admonishes the acceptance of "truth" without acknowledging the social fictions at work in male-dominated exegesis:
We need women commentators to bring out the women's side of the book; we need the stereoscopic view of truth in general, which can only be had when woman's eye and man's together shall discern the perspective of the Bible's full-orbed revelation.
I do not at all impugn the good intention of the good men who have been our exegetes, and I bow humbly in the presence of their scholarship; but while they turn their linguistic telescopes on truth, I may be allowed to make a correction for the "personal equation" in the results which they espy.
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he messy process through which norms and standards have beenconstructed and imposed
It might be useful here to think about the "social aspects" of rhetoric as they were mentioned in the MicroResponse:
In other words, taste depends not only upon the senses, but also upon established standards. Thus there is a social aspect here as well, which is one of the ways that taste is rhetorical – it is a product of the dynamic relationship between the self and the world.
I think this procedural notion also resembles Rickert's ideas in "Rhetorical Prehistory and the Paleolithic"... For him, rhetoric is not something we do, but something we take part in. Hence his use of the term "rhetoricity."
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Locke’s logicalprocess of knowledge discernmen
World → sensory perception → idea → word.
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“Norm, Measure of All Things,”
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rhetoric,too.
In many ways this draws upon John Muckelbauer's essay "The Return of the Question." The question is, of course, "What is rhetoric?" Throughout his essay, Muckelbauer works through the "ubiquity of the question" -- the variety of places we encounter it, the people who ask us, and the different answers we provide. The inexplicable nature of the question, even from the beginning, creates a disorientation:
So even at the moment of its historical origin, rhetoric already suffered from a kind of identity crisis (one that would, as we all know, intrinsically complicate the possibility of pointing to the moment of its historical origin). Even at that time, one might easily have responded to the question 'What is rhetoric?' with the answer, 'The art of never finally answering that question.'
Never finally answering the question, while at times infuriating, opens up the possibility of rethinking the history of rhetoric in the way this Elaboration needs. It is not a history of rhetoric that assumes the tradition of theory after theory finding ways to normalize (even though, as already stated, is neither unusual nor unproductive when thinking through rhetoric). Instead, it is a history that manifests (embodies) the very chaos that is the human body. I think Muckelbauer would agree, as he suggests that all of the attempts to answer the question do not “necessarily do an injustice to the diffuse history and conceptual promiscuity of the term.” So, this just might be another messy attempt to answer the question again.
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naturally
See Jay Dolmage's book Disability Rhetoric
Is this Elaboration an attempt to think in a similar way? Or maybe even copy?
Disability Rhetoric is the first book to view rhetorical theory and history through the lens of disability studies. Traditionally, the body has been seen as, at best, a rhetorical distraction; at worst, those whose bodies do not conform to a narrow range of norms are disqualified from speaking. Yet, Dolmage argues that communication has always been obsessed with the meaning of the body and that bodily difference is always highly rhetorical. Following from this rewriting of rhetorical history, he outlines the development of a new theory, affirming the ideas that all communication is embodied, that the body plays a central role in all expression, and that greater attention to a range of bodies is therefore essential to a better understanding of rhetorical histories, theories, and possibilities.
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processes and development of idea
George Campbell's distinctions between scientific and intuitive evidence might support this claim. He seems to go along with the idea that scientific reasoning is subject to errors just like anything else:
And if there are, on the other hand, some well-known demonstrations, of so great authority, that it would equally look like lunacy to impugn, it may deserve the attention of the curious to inquire how far, with respect to the bulk of mankind, these circumstances, their having stood the test of ages, their having obtained the universal suffrage of those who are qualified to examine them (things purely of the nature of moral evidence), have contributed to that unshaken faith with which they are received. (923)
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sensations
In addition to the quotes from Hume in the MicroResponse, this might be helpful:
"It appears then, that, amidst all the variety and caprice of taste, there are certain general principles of approbation or blame, whose influence a careful eye may trace in all operations of the mind. Some particular forms or qualities, from the original structure of the internal fabric, are calculated to please, and others to displease; and if they fail of their effect in any particular instance, it is from some apparent defect or imperfection in the organ...Many and frequent are the defects in the internal organs, which prevent or weaken the influence of those general principles, on which depends our sentiment of beauty or deformity" (833).
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reality
As we move into the 19th century, some women speakers challenge the notions mentioned in a previous annotation about Mary Astell, particularly Sarah Grimké. In one of her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, Grimké touches upon a more oppressive tradition of making women feel powerful in the private, domestic sphere in order to keep them from reaching beyond their "natural" boundaries. She attempts to break down the historical boundaries of the public and private, the domestic and the political, the masculine and the feminine that someone like Astell still seems to uphold.
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value the “natural” separations
Mary Astell, another Enlightenment thinker, is really interesting to link up here. From the intro to her section in The Rhetorical Tradition,:
For Astell, women's rhetoric should focus on the art of conversation... This is women's proper rhetorical sphere, different from but in no way inferior to the public sphere in which men use oratory. (845)
Astell makes some interesting moves around the concept of "natural" throughout A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II. She claims that women's "natural sphere" is the private and domestic, which aligns with the social distinctions between public and private as masculine and feminine spheres. But she rejects the "natural" characteristic of the private as powerless.
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bedetermined
In some ways this feels a little too close to the saying "there is no normal." Conversely, because of my interests in disabilities studies, this gets a little too close to the belief that "we are all disabled." How closely does this proposal align with those (verging on banal) mottos?
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Let one of these crusted distinctions return to its source, and in this alchemic center it may be re-made, again becoming molten liquid, and may enter into new combinations, whereat it may be again thrown forth as a new crust, a different dis-tinction. So that A may become non-A. But not merely by a leap from one state to the other. Rather, we must take A back into the ground of its existence, the logical substance that is its causal ancestor, and on to a point where it is con-substantial with non-A; then we may return, this time emerging with non-A instead.
Looking ahead to Cixous, there will be some interesting overlaps here. In "The Laugh of the Medusa" she attempts to break down the gender binary of "man=A" and "woman=non-A" (castration, mutilation, MEDUSA), to be annotated there...
I had never realized it until now, but she even uses the same earthly metaphors:
This doesn't mean that she's an undifferentiated magma, but that she doesn't lord it over her body or her desire (1533).
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Since all these devices had a "you and me" quality about them, being "addressed" to some person or to some advan-tage, we classed them broadly under the heading of a Rhetoric.
I've always wondered why Burke uses the first-person plural and this is the closest I can get to an explanation:
Here he says that it is the presence of two entities -- a speaker and an audience -- that makes a communicative act rhetorical. Burke is suggesting that it's not the persuasive intentions or strategies, but rather the relationship that is important.
This might fit into his larger arguments of identification throughout the Rhetoric of Motives:
The Rhetoric deals with the possibilities of classification in its partisan aspects; it considers the ways in which individuals are at odds with one another, or become identified with groups more or less at odds with one another.
Why "at odds," you may ask, when the titular term is "identification"? Because, to begin with "identification" is, by the same token, though roundabout, to confront the implications of division.
Maybe he is making a more implicit move toward identification, since that is the ultimate rhetorical act. And, through involving his audience and readers in his own schemes and maneuvers, he opens up his arguments to ambiguity and division.
Or maybe he's just a weirdo.
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\Lb;o}
I think the paragraph at the bottom of column 1, going into column 2 gets at the question here. The ability to "deflect attention" as it's described (either deflecting attention from the scene or from the agent) says something about the negotiating that is oftentimes necessary in the ability to speak or act at particular moments. Being able to shift between agent vs. scene has some leverage in determining next moves. So, maybe it's not that it's in one of the pentad categories, but in all of them a little bit.
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They are the motives proper to the specialty as such, but not to the specialty as participant in a wider context of motives.
From page 1329: "Any specialized activity participates in a larger unit of action."
Burke seems to be reiterating the social and political web that Nietzsche suggests throughout On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. The fictions we come to believe as truth must be taken into consideration as part of a larger network of relationships and systems that are at once predetermined and unstable.
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In accordance with the rhetorical principle of identification, when-ever you find a doctrine of "nonpolitical" esthet-ics affirmed with fervor, look for its politics.
As we've discussed in class quite a few times, "I'm not political" is an incredibly political statement.
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And obvi-ously the interests in actual control of the agency that allocated the rights and resources of atomic development could have all the advantages of real ownership, however international might be the fictions of ownership. Where the control re-sides, there resides the function of ownership, whatever the fictions of ownership may be.
Throughout this section, Burke calls attention to the ways we use universal truths to act out discriminatory practices. In doing so, there's an inconsistency between the name we give something and the function it serves. The "truth" of the thing doesn't equal the way it operates in the world. In the case he presents here, the power is named "United Nations," but the power is acted out through the "United States." (Would claims to religious freedom to deny service to, say, LGBT couples be included in something like this? The fiction is "religious liberty" but the function is "discrimination"?)
How can we connect this back to Willard and Nietzsche? What do they say about fiction and power that resonates here?
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Hence magic is put under a microscope, or even test by a knowl-treated as an early uncritical attempt to do what edge of exactly equivalent conditions in the past, science does, but under conditions where judg- when you tum to political exhortation, you are ment and perception were impaired by the involved in decisions that necessarily lie beyond nai'vely anthropomorphic belief that the imper- the strictly scientific vocabularies of description. sonal forces of nature were motivated by per- And since the effective politician is a "spell-sonal designs.
To what extent does imagination play in this early "bad science"? And how is imagination hindered/lost or accelerated/sustained in the paradigms of modern "good science"?
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I have been leading up-or down, if you like-to an extremely simple and obvious but ::f: fundamental remark:
I'm digging this orientational ambiguity. Are we at the top or the bottom of his thinking? What is the difference? Is top/good and bottom/bad? How do we decide that?
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peculiar character
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How words mean, ts not a question to which we can safely accept an answer either as an inheritance from common sense, that curious growth, or as something vouched fo~ by another science, by psychology, say-since other sciences use words themselves and not least delusively when they address themselves to these questions.
Is he implying here that rhetoric will only do itself a disservice by attaching itself (or attempting to define itself) to other disciplines?
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blinkers
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We have not here in view the more familiar ways in which words may be used to deceive. In a later chapter, when the function of language as an instrument for the promotion of purposes rather than as a means of !iymbolizing references is fully discussed, we shall see how the intention of the speaker may complicate the situation.
It seems as though this reading vacillates between weak defense and strong defense more than others.
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those who fail are punished by the dislike or neglect of society.
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mental image
Like Nietzsche -- the reference is a metaphorical nerve stimulus.
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It is widely accepted that a surface directly perpendicular to the body provides the best environment for bodies to function. As a result, the surfaces of designed grounds are overwhelmingly flat, and non-flat floors are marked as problems to be fixed.
James Turrell does some work with space and light that might be of interest here.
I nearly threw up in his "Apani" installation during the 2011 Venice Biennale.
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The very idea of inclusion, of opening up and expanding the conceptual parameters of human bodies, depends for its logic and operation on the existence of parameters in the first place.
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trivium
Definition: "grammar, rhetoric, and logic," the first three of the seven liberal arts in the Middle Ages, considered initiatory and foundational to the other four: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.
Etymology: From Latin "trivium," tri (three) + via (road); a place where three roads meet.
Wikipedia has it broken down as "grammar, logic, and rhetoric" = "input, process, and output." This is pretty consistent with Enlightenment thinking that logic is the process and rhetoric is the presentation. I'm interested in how this gets appropriated to a trivium of "syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics."
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Later discussions of Peirce's theory generally ignore iL, connections to rhetoric and the medieval trivium.
Going along with the definition annotation above, I'm interested in why? Does it just not matter to how we understand Peirce's theory? With the categories of input, process, and output, though (thanks, Wikipedia), it seems like the connection to previous models might be helpful...?
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And just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that he secs on all sides the eyes of the universe tele-scopically focused upon his action and thought. It is remarkable that this was brought about by the intellect, which was certainly allotted to these most unfortunate, delicate, and ephemeral beings merely as a device for detaining them a minute within existence.
There’s a really interesting link to be made with Willard here. Nietzsche is taking on the philosopher (as well as Enlightenment thinking), as philosophers tend to position themselves at the center of universe because they are on the search for truth. He challenges the science of it, saying that the telescopic (read: narrow) inquiry is futile as they are on a search for something that is not there. In other words, the more a philosopher tries to focus in on “the truth,” the more a philosopher loses sight of the purpose of the inquiry.
Likewise, Willard takes on patriarchal exegesis as though it, too, is a science. By using the telescopic metaphor (similar to Nietzsche), she makes it clear that a search for truth in such a narrow sense is useless to the human endeavor. From “The Letter Killeth”:
“We need women commentators to bring out the women’s side of the book; we need the stereoscopic view of truth in general, which can only be had when a woman’s eye and man’s together shall discern the perspective of the Bible’s full-orbed revelation…while they turn their linguistic telescopes on truth, I may be allowed to make a correction for the “personal equation” in the results which they espy” (1126).
Although Willard does suggest that the truth can be reached (a “full orbed revelation”), it is not until both halves — the woman’s and the man’s — is taken into account. Again, the more a male preacher tries to focus in on "the truth," the more he loses sight of the purpose of the inquiry. Really, all of humanity is a stake for Willard.
I don't know. There’s something going on with eyes and telescopes and science and philosophy and exegesis, but I’m not quite sure how to articulate it…
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for
Here's a photo of Derrida and a cat, just for reference when we're moving into the 20th century:
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The various languages placed•side by side Slvtl'l t(, show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many lari-guages.1
While this is suggesting that the existence of different languages is proof that there is no essential connection between word and thing (see footnote), I think Spencer attempts to tackle this concept (maybe another part of it) with his ill-conceived un cheval noir example.
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What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus.
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But at the same time. from boredom and necessity, man wishes lo exist so-cially and with the herd; therefore, he needs lo make peace and strives accordingly to banish from his world at least the most flagrant /Jellum omni contra 011111es.4 This peace treaty brings in I its wake something which appears to be the first step toward acquiring that puzzling truth drive: to wit, that which shall count as "truth" from now on is established.
Establishing language = establishing truth = establishing community?
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In short, emphasizes Nietzsche, "la11gue1ge is rhetoric, because it desires to convey only a doxa [opinion], not an episteme [knowledge]."
With the marginal note from Nathaniel in mind, this binary is really interesting (and necessary) to unpack. I've had to read a lot of Foucault lately, so I'm thinking with him through a lot of my other readings right now. But his use of episteme, in some ways, breaks down that binary. By treating an episteme as the "epistemological unconscious" of an era (meaning that some knowledge and some assumptions are so inherent at a specific time and place that society doesn't even know it's happening), Foucault seems to suggest that opinion and knowledge can uniquely shift and intertwine in each epoch (again, within a culture that doesn't even know it's happening).
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Th~ wi~l, \o ppwer is a motivat-ing force, not good or bad in itself.
The strong defense of the will to power.
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The maxims contained in works on composition and rhetoric, are pre-sented in an unorganized form
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where there is a deficient verbal memory, or an inadequale sense of logical depen-dence, or but little perception of order, or a Jack of constructive ingenuity; no amount of instruc-tion will remedy the defect. Nevertheless, some practical result may be expected from a familiar-ity with the principles of style. The endeavour to conform to Jaws may tell, though slowly. And if in no other way, yet, as facilitating revision, a knowledge of the thing to be achieved-a clear idea of what constitutes a beauty, and what a blemish-cannot fail to be of service.
Hume suggests a similar idea in Of the Standard of Taste There are standards we should adhere to, and we should try to learn them the best we can (although sometimes we just can't, and that's our fault).:
It appears then, that, amidst all the variety and caprice of taste, !here are certain general principles of approbation or blame, whose influence a careful eye may trace in all operations of the mind. Some particular forms or qualities, from the original structure of the internal fabric are calculated to please, and others to displease; and if they fail of their effect in any particular instance, it is from some apparent defect or imperfection in the organ.
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that, there-fore, a writer who increases this power by stimulat-ing mental action arrives, by a different road, at the same destination which is reached by another writer who by a wise economy prevents unnecessary waste.
It is useless to assume anything about an audience's mental processes, mostly because you're going to say what you want to say anyway and you're still not going to ensure an audience's understanding.
I think Locke would wholeheartedly agree with this.
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It docs not undertake to furnish a person with something 10 say; but it does under-take to tell him how best to say that with which he has provided himself.
No invention happening here!
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It seems silly to list these kinds of things out, but I think this shows the shifts in oral vs. written communication. In a speech we provide verbal cues and pauses to indicate the progression of ideas; with more and more people in comp classes at this time it is necessary to provide some instruction in how we translate that to writing.
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discrimination
This use of "discrimination" is confusing for me (as it was in the introduction that delineated the identifiable mental operations (according to Bain)): discrimination, retentiveness, and agreement. I mist remember this can also just mean something like "recognition." (Although, I do find it entertaining to just keep reading as though this is actually meaning "bias" or "intolerance." -- "There are three mental operations: retentiveness, agreement, and detesting others based upon a single trait." Sounds right.)
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They corre-spond to the three departments of the human mind, the Understanding, the Will, and the Feel-ings.
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Oratory, or Persuasion,
This is where we can start to see the splits (and intersections) between speech, writing, and rhetoric. So, Oratory is not rhetoric here. And Persuaion is also not rhetoric here. This seems to be going against earlier rhetoricians who focused primarily on elocution and oratory. Instead, those (Oratory and Persuasion) are just modes of discourse, which can be "rendered effective" through rhetoric.
In other words, it is not just Oratory or Persuasion that "uses rhetoric"; instead, all of these modes are rhetorical.
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A reading book may be used for the purpose.
This sounds sooooooo booooooring (but also still a thing that happens).
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Rhetoric conveys the re-sults of thought, but it is not itself a form of thought. Hill relies on the modes of dis-course-narration, description, and argumentation-and he wishes to focus rhetoric on iL'i proper subject, excluding all that is peripheml.
Like Enlightenment thinking, this suggests that knowledge and truth is objective, separate from social interaction. We don't actively create truth through communication, but rather passively gain and disseminate truth through three modes "narration, description, and argument" (Hill) (or four modes if you're Bain).
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Such contradictions can be corrected by encouraging women, too, to write interprelations of the Bible.
This is one of those moments that might be what the authors of this intro mean when they say that Willard seems to be completely unaware of Grimke and Fell:
Gimke, page 1050:
The New Testament has been referred to, and I am willing lo abide by its decisions, but must enter my protest against the false translation of some passages by the MEN who did that work, and against the perverted interpretation by the MEN who undertook to write commentaries thereon. I am inclined to think, when we are admitted to the honor of studying Greek and Hebrew, we shall produce some various readings of the Bible a little different from those we now have.
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fast and loose
The definitions of "fast and loose" as unreliable, irresponsible, and deceitful seem important to Willard's approach throughout most of her professional life. She uses the phrase throughout this section specifically to describe the patterns of exegesis, but it might be applicable to how she sees most human endeavors.
In other words, Willard suggests throughout much of her work, per the introduction and excerpts, that society's major problems can all be linked to a lack of self-control and responsibility (two characteristics that seem to be more common in women, so obvs they should be more publicly powerful).
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Of the book's seven chapters, then, only three are entirely her words
Kind of like our assignments for History of Rhetoric 2.
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From this time I understood the words abolition and abolitionist, and always drew near when that word was spoken, expecting to hear something of importance to myself and fellow-slaves.
"All that I know I have stolen" (1063).
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franchise
It's most often used in reference to the right to vote, but the term carries the larger meaning of just a right or privilege in general. It can also be "freedom or immunity from some burden or restriction vested in a person or group."
I think the broader political and social meanings of "franchise" and its derivations -- most commonly "enfranchise" and "disenfranchise" -- make it a key term for rhetoric, particularly as we continue to ask questions like “What is Rhetoric?” or “What was Rhetoric?” or “Whatever Rhetoric?” or “Which Rhetorics?” or “When Rhetoric?” or “Whenever Rhetoric?” or “What will be Rhetoric?” or “What will have been Rhetoric?” or “What isn’t Rhetoric?”
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mighty power.
This, again, makes me think back to Mary Astell and her focus on women's rhetorical sphere being the private conversation, which in that she seemed to be attempting to raise that sphere as worthy of attention and a site of power.
There's a lot of scholarship on the power (and lack thereof) in silence and private discourse. I'm thinking mostly about Cheryl Glenn's Unspoken, but also Glenn and Ratcliffe's Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts. And then, of course, there's the highly contested Belenky et al. Women's Ways of Knowing.
But... Grimké is touching upon a more oppressive tradition of making women feel powerful in the private, domestic sphere in order to keep them from reaching beyond their "natural" boundaries. She's attempting to break down the boundaries of the public and private, the domestic and the political, the masculine and the feminine. And doing it in a private letter, which brings up some really interesting questions about genre and private vs. public discourse.
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I follow him lhrough all his precepts, and find him giving the same directions to women as 10 men, never even referring 10 the distinction now so strenuously in-sislcd upon between masculine and feminine virtues: this is one of' the anli-christian "tradilions of men" which are taught instead of the "com-mandments of God."
I'm interested in this "distinction" between masculine and feminine. From what I understand from The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Foucault), these gender identities -- as both assigned and claimed -- would have been a fairly new phenomenon. Is Grimké picking up on these new medicalized and categorized discourses?
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I am inclined to think, when we arc admitted to the honor of studying Greek and Hebrew, we shall produce some various readings of the Bible a little different from those we now have.
Translation is tricky (and politically charged) business.
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0, ye fairer sisters, whose hands arc never soiled, whose nerves and muscles arc never strained, go learn by experience! Had we had the opportunity that you have had, 10 improve our moral and mental faculties, what would have hin-dered our inlcllccts from hcing as hright, and our manners from hcing as dignified as yours'! I-lad it been our lot to have been nursed in the lap of af-fluence and case, and to have husked beneath lhc smiles and sunshine of fortune, should we not have naturally supposed that we were never made to toil'! And why arc not our forms as deli-cate, and our constitutions as slender, as yours'! Is not the workmanship as curious and complete'! Have pity upon us, have pity upon us, 0 ye who have hearts to feel for other's woes: for the hand of God has !ouched us. Owing to the disadvan-tages under which we labor, there arc many !low-ers among us that arc
Long before the concept of intersectionality was introduced to feminism, Stewart is making it clear that arguing for the rights of African American women is much different than arguing for the rights of white women.
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he did not scruple to chastise African Ameri-cans, particularly black men, for running after trivial pursuits, for lacking in educa-tional and professional ambition, and for avoiding the challenging task of speaking up for their people's rights.
The Black Lives Matter movement has a similar dialogue embedded in it:
But this call to "be better" puts the onus back on the oppressed on a whole other level:
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amanuensis
Definition: one employed to write from dictation or to copy manuscript <composed her="" autobiography="" with="" the="" help="" of="" an="" amanuensis="">
Also, I find the etymology really interesting given her life as an indentured servant, then domestic servant:
Etymology: Latin (in Suetonius) adj. used subst., < a manu a secretary, short for servus a manu + -ensis belonging to.
In short, the choice of the word "amanuensis" seems...ironic?...given the etymological roots in servitude and ownership.
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Not surprh,ingly, as women's education improved, women increasingly began to speak in public :md to reflect on their rhetorical practices.
From the intro to Mary Astell's section: "For Astell, women's rhetoric should focus on the art of conversation... This is women's proper rhetorical sphere, different from but in no way inferior to the public sphere in which men use oratory" (845).
In what ways does this new focus on women's public oratory affect Astell's insistence on private, domestic, and/or conversational discourse as sites of rhetorical power? Especially as we consider this part from Mary Beard's lecture: "In the early fourth century BC Aristophanes devoted a whole comedy to the ‘hilarious’ fantasy that women might take over running the state. Part of the joke was that women couldn’t speak properly in public – or rather, they couldn’t adapt their private speech (which in this case was largely fixated on sex) to the lofty idiom of male politics."
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Ralph Waldo Emerson, too, appealed to rhetoric in calling for a powerful Romantic fonn of oratory.
New England Heartthrob:
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Under this pressure from both sides toward independent development. rhetoric and belles \cures split. In 1828, a chair of English literature was e$lablished at London University; in 1845, Edinburgh separated rhetoric and literature; in I 876, Johns Hopkins and Harvard did the same; and in 1904, laggard Cambridge followed. By the end of the century, a further split had occurred in the United States: Speech depart· mcnts had formed, taking the elocution course and the study of rhetoric with them.
I think about this split quite often. As someone with two degrees largely focused on literature, and seeking one focused on rhetoric, I find myself lost in the (messy and often blurred) boundaries between the two fields. The later assertion from Mill, "For poetry, utterance is the end, not, as in rhetoric, the means to an end" (996) seems to hold true even today. Literature is rarely seen as social action, let alone socially engaged. I wonder how damaging (or not) this is as we attempt to think about "our disciplinary identity crisis less as a crisis of identity and more as an opening of alterity" (Muckelbauer).
This is probably why I am so intrigued by Muckelbauer's argument that "we might even conceive of rhetoric as, in a certain way, disengaging from the entire problematic of 'fields,' disconnecting from both 'interdisciplinary studies' and work in the 'rhetoric of x' genre (indicating, perhaps, an ontological rhetoric)."
But what does this look like? How does this happen? The end of this intro seem to give some hope -- "Literary theorists, too, began to acknowledge...the wider scope afforded by a rhetorical approach to discourse" (998, emphasis mine). But how often is literature viewed as discourse? And is this a reciprocal engagement?
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www.csicop.org www.csicop.org
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For example, the claim that the Moon landing in 1969 was a hoax implies the complicity of thousands of American scientists and technicians, as well as that of Soviet astronomers and others around the world who tracked the event.
Another (fictional) conspiracy theory concerning the moon landing: Operation Avalanche
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This occurs when defenders of a conspiracy theory find it necessary to implicate more and more people whose failure to discover or reveal the conspiracy can be explained only by their alleged complicity.
"It teaches us, in a word, to admire and to blame with judgment, and not to follow the crowd blindly" (Blair 953).
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Scientists will never reach a consensus with Flat Earthers or with those who believe the Earth was created in 4004 bce. Nor do they need to. The best that science can provide is a clearly specified degree of consensus among scientists who base their conclusions on empirical data. Efforts to reach consensus on important questions have been discouraged due to the influence of philosophers of science who emphasize conflicting research programs, paradigm shifts, and scientific revolutions (Franklin 2009; Stove 1982).
"In our days, we keep away from the art of inventing arguments, and think that this skill is of no use. We hear people affirming that, if individuals are critically endowed, it is succinct to teach them a certain subject, and they will have the capacity to discover whether there is any truth in that subject. It is claimed that, without any previous training in the ars topica, any person will be able to discern the probabilities which surround any ordinary topic, and to evaluate them by the same standard employed in the stifling of truth. But who can be sure that he has taken into consideration every feature of the subject on hand'! The most eulogizing epithet that can he given to a speech is that it is "comprehensive": praise is due to the speaker who has left nothing untouched, and has omitted nothing from the argument, nothing which may be missed by his listeners." (Vico 869)
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The authorities responded by citing findings from large epidemiologic studies, but much of the press coverage highlighted anecdotal accounts and human-interest stories.
Campbell argues pretty heavily for testimony as a solid form of evidence (pages 919-20).
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With scientific claims, the only definitive answer is to reexamine the original research data and repeat the experiments and analysis. But no one has the time or the expertise to examine the original research literature on every topic, let alone repeat the research. As such, it is important to have some guidelines for deciding which theories are plausible enough to merit serious examination.
"The superiority of Scientific Evidence Reexamined":
"Allow me now to ask, Will he be so perfectly satisfied on the first trial as not to think it of importance to make a second, perhaps u third, and a fourth? Whence arises this diffidence'! Purely from the consciousness of the fallibility of his own faculties. But to what purpose, it may be said, the reiterations of the at-tempt, since it is impossible for him, by any efforts, to shake off his dependence on the accuracy of his attention and fidelity of his memory? Or, what can he have more than reiterated testimonies of his memory, in support of the truth of its for-mer testimony? I acknowledge, that after a hundred attempts he can have no more. But even this is a great deal. We learn from experience, that the mistakes or oversights committed by the mind in one operation. arc sometime!-., on a review, corrected on the second, or perhaps on a third. Besides, the repetition, when no error is discovered, enlivens the remembrance, and so strengthens the conviction. But, for this conviction. it is plain that we are in a great measure indebted to memory. and in some measure even to experience." (Campbell 922)
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We may distinguish three kinds, or degrees, of eloquence.
See Campbell's breakdown of appealing to the passions. I think these strikingly similar hierarchies might be important for the conviction/persuasion distinction made on page 970 (as pointed out by Nathaniel).
It is not, however, every kind of pathos, which will give the orator so great an ascendancy over the minds of his hearers. All passions are not alike capable of producing this effect. Some are naturally inert and torpid; they deject the mind, and indispose it for enterprise . Of this kind are sorrow, fear, shame, humility. Others, on the contrary, elevate the soul, and stimulate to action. Such are hope, patriotism, ambition, emulation, anger. These, with the greatest facility, are made to concur in direction with arguments exciting to resolution and activity : and are, consequently , the fittest for producing what, for want of a better term in our language, I shall henceforth denominate the vehement. There is, besides, an intermediate kind of passions, which do not so congenially and directly either restrain us from acting, or incite us to act; but, by the art of the speaker, can, in an oblique manner, be made conducive to either. Such are joy, love, esteem, compassion. Nevertheless, all these kinds may find a place in suasory discourses, or such as are intended to operate on the will. The first is properest for, dissuading; the second, as hath been already hinted, for persuad- ing; the third is equally accommodated to both. (904)
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In chil-dren, the rudiments of taste discover themselves very early in a thousand instances; in lheir fond· ness for regular bodies, their admiration of pic-tures and statues,
To what extent do the earliest introductions to norms play into these "rudiments of taste"?
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when tion, which, without their aid, might have passed every one erects himself into a judge, and when unobserved; and which, though of a delicate na-we can hardly mingle in polite society without ture, frequently exert a powerful influence on bearing some share in such discussions;
This sounds a lot like current complaints of the interwebs, particularly social media. Everyone's a critic!
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But allow him more experience in works of this kind, and his taste becomes by degrees more exact and enlightened. He begins to perceive not only the character of the whole, but the beauties and de-f eels of each part; and i~ able to describe the pe-culiar qualities which he praises or blames. The mist is dissipalcd which seemed formerly to hang over the object; and he can at length pronounce firmly, and without hesitation, concerning it. Thus, in taste, considered as mere sensibility, ex-ercise opens a great source of improvement.
This reminds me of Hume: "A good palate is not tried by strong flavors; but by a mixture of small ingredients, where we are still sensible of each part, notwithstanding its minuteness and its confusion with the rest" (835).
Anyone can praise or blame based on the most obvious and strongest characteristics of something. Taste is only at play when one is able to praise or blame based on the subtle and intricate details of the thing under review.
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As Blair modestly acknowledges, there is little in the lectures that is original
It's just a bunch of annotations.
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CHAPTER Vll
Chapter VIII: Just Take What Chapter VII Said About General Audience Awareness and Use Your Discretion to Make It Specific to More Particular Audiences.
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Analogous to this, there arc two things in every discourse which principally claim our aucntion, the sense and the expression; or in other words, the thought and the symbol by •. J. which ii is communicated.
I was having a hard time making sense of this analogy. This passage on the next page clarified it a bit:
Now, if it be by the sense or soul of the dis-course that rhetoric holds of logic, or the art of thinking and reasoning, it is by the expression or body of the discourse that she holds of grammar, or the art or conveying our thoughts in the words of a particular language. The observation of one analogy naturally suggests another. As the soul is or heavenly extraction and the body of earthly, so the sense of the discourse ought to have its source in the invariable nature of truth and right. whereas the expression can derive its energy only from the arbitrary conventions of men, sources as unlike, or rather as widely different, as the breath of the Almighty and the dust of the earth.
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Hence it hath become a common topic with rhetoricians, that, in order to be a successful orator, one must be a good ~ . man; for to be good is the only sure way of ci..~ being long esteemed good, and to be esteemed ~ good is previously necessary 10 one's being 6 .... •~ heard with due allention and regard.
Ah, yes, the weak defense.
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CHAPTER VI
Chapter VII: General Audience Awareness
But, really, Mere Rhetoric has a nice (I'm assuming she's mostly on point here) summary of some of the concepts to follow.
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To prevent mistakes, it will not be beside my purpose further lo remark, that several of the cerms above explained arc sometimes used by rhetoricians and critics in a much larger and more vague signification, than has been given them here.
Would this paragraph be enough clarification for Locke?
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But as there are other things which pass in the mind of man, beside ideas; as he is not wholly made up of intellect, but on the contr.iry, the pas-sions, and the fancy, compose great part of his complicated frame; as the operations of tl,tese are attended with an infinite variety of emotions in the mind, both in kind and degree; it is clear, that unless there be some means found, of manifest-ing those emotions, all that passes in the mind of one man can not be communicated to another. Now, as in order to know what another knows, and in the same manner that he knows it, an exact transcript of the ideas which pass in the mind of one man, must be made by sensible marks, in the mind of another; so in order to feel what another feels, the emotions which are in the mind of one man, must also be communicated to that of an-other, by sensible marks.
This is reminiscent of Locke's thoughts on simple and complex ideas: the only way language truly work is if both parties have the same understanding of the words being used. Sheridan seems to take it a bit further, though, possibly drawing upon Hume's decanting of subjectivity.
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1 am aware it will be said, that written lan-guage is only a copy of that which is spoken, and has a constant reference to articulation; the char-aclers upon paper, being only symbols of articu-late sounds
I know we're not supposed to say "I disagree," so I'll try to go about this a bit more cautiously. This line of thinking is, I think, one of the more pervasive misconceptions about composition still today. When considering accessibility options, a lot of people with disabilities are often told, "Just get some dictation software." But this very rarely does what people need it to do, not just because of the editing difficulty, but because the ways we talk (and listen) are often just too different than the ways we write (and read).
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Those who know all the loci, i.e., the lines of argument to he used, arc able (by an operation not unlike reading the printed characters on a page) to grasp extemporaneously lhe elements or persuasion in-herent in any question or case.
This feels very sophistic (and, by extension, would be criticized by Isocrates -- just because you teach the letters of the alphabet doesn't mean students know what to do with them...or something like that...).
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Some or the new instruments or science arc, ./ """\ \ themselves, sciences; others arc arts; still others, c\v,W{' . producL'i of either art or nature
How is his usage of "sciences" and "arts" here different (or not) from "technology"? In other words, to what extent is he saying that instrumental developments in science and art are the result of new technology?
He explicitly describes technological advances like the microscope, telescope, and mariner's needle, but can the other developments be attributed to technology in more implicit (but nonetheless important) ways?
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thefunambulist.net thefunambulist.net
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spaces
Marcel Duchamp, Door, 11 rue Larrey "The door is operated between two adjacent rooms. When it is open in one direction it is closed in another. Intention to create a condition by which the room is never fully independent from the adjoining spaces."
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Underpinning these discussions was the belief that the materiality of the body, one’s physical features were a catalogue of signs to be interpreted not only for the sake one’s own body, as was the case for bedside medicine, but rather and mainly for the body politic.
So many sources to share here, but here is one in particular that I think is especially relevant today, particularly as we think about enforcement of norms based on appearance and how it...defines (?)...national identity: "Disabled Upon Arrival: The Rhetorical Construction of Disability and Race at Ellis Island" by Jay Dolmage. Hopefully this link takes you to the PDF.
Important quote: "Ellis Island was designed to process the immigrant body—through an industrialized choreography, through a regime of vision, and through layers of anti-immigration discourse. Ellis Island became the key laboratory and operating theater for American eugenics, the scientific racism that can be seen to define a unique era of Western history, the effects of which can still be felt today. I will argue that Ellis Island, as a rhetorical space, can be seen as a nexus—and a special point of origin—for eugenics and the rhetorical construction of disability and race in the early twentieth century" (27).
Also, here's a video of this paper presented as a lecture.
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The rhetor should not seek to humili-ate or triumph over her audience. Rather her goal should be to get them to sec the truth, and Astell notes that progress to truth is often impeded for people who do not want to admit that they were wrong. Don't wring such an admission from them, she advises, or make them feel that they arc submitting by agreeing with you, and you will move them to truth more quickly.
This sounds an awful lot like invitational rhetoric (which of course has plenty of pitfalls, but still worth considering, I think).
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For Astell, women's rhetoric should focus on the art of conversation, .is both Sutherland and Renaissance scholar Jane Donawerth have argued. This is women's proper rhetori-cal sphere, different from but in no way inlerior to the public sphere in which men use oratory.
In some ways this can seem incredibly conservative and oppressive -- why not advocate for women speaking publicly like men's public orations? However, claiming private, domestic speech is in anyway worth considering is a radical idea (today, even). This elevates the private -- and therefore feminine -- sphere to a place of rhetorical power.
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A very delicate palate, on many occasions, may be a great incon-venience both to a man himself and lo his friends: But a delicate taste of wit or beauty must always be a desirable quality; because it is the source of all the finest and most innocent enjoy-ments, of which human nature is susceptible.
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It_ appears then, that, amidst all the variety and c~pnce of taste, !here are certain general prin-ciples of approbat10n or blame, whose influence a careful eye may trace in all operations of the mind ..
And now here he's switching over to objectivity. If you don't appreciate the classics, there's something wrong with you.
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On the con-trary, a thousand different sentiments, excited by the same object, are all right: Because no senti-ment represents what is really in the object.
Here, up until halfway through page 833, Hume seems to be playing up subjectivity (well, giving it some room to breathe, anyway).
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speech
Ah, yes, here's the attack on rhetoric (albeit a weak/narrow definition of "rhetoric"). I've been thinking a lot lately about manipulation vs. persuasion, deception vs. convincing, probably with the recent (or only recent attention to) fake news.
On a similar, but also different note: is figurative language considered here deception or manipulation because it not only plays with the "essence" of one thing in comparing it to another, but it also appears to double down by playing with the essence of two things? I think the concept of "relations" is at play here, but I'm not quite sure how. It seems as though Locke affirms relations between things (as a comparison without unity), but an attack on figurative language seems to go against that...
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mixed modes,
"Mixed modes" comes up quite a few times throughout this excerpt, so I went looking for a definition...
Here's a breakdown of "complex ideas" that might be helpful with some of the terminology used throughout this excerpt (modes, substances, and relations).
Also, when I got to Book III, 18-20, I kind of wished those were earlier. They give a quick (and maybe useful?) explanation of simple ideas, simple modes, mixed modes, and substances.
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enculturation.net enculturation.net
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Even if we confine ourselves to its institutional incarnation, we might, for instance, see rhetoric as one particular field of study among others—and perhaps inquire into how its "tradition" intersects with that of other fields (like composition, or cultural studies, or philosophy [Vandenberg] [Welch]). Or we might conceive of it as a kind of architectonic principle for all kinds of inquiry and perhaps attempt to distinguish a distinctively rhetorical element within any given field (say, the rhetoric of science). Or we might even conceive of rhetoric as, in a certain way, disengaging from the entire problematic of "fields," disconnecting from both "interdisciplinary studies" and work in the "rhetoric of x" genre (indicating, perhaps, an ontological rhetoric).
These "divergent structural possibilities" (lovely phrasing, BTW) seem to suggest not necessarily interdisciplinarity, but rather interdependence and/or inclusion. So, how does this either confirm or complicate the later call to see the "disciplinary identity crisis" as "an opening of alterity"?
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Howeverfrequenttheireuphoricflightsabouttheunlim-itedpowersandmalleabilityofman,theyknewthatrhetoricaleducation,inpractice,sawmanaslimited,notunlimited,livinginaworldofplay,notofidealforms.
If I'm reading this correctly, this is saying that to live in a world of ideal forms would be the less limiting option here. However, I usually consider ideal forms to be quite limiting as I generally understand idealism to be so closely aligned with essentialism. For example, when students are introduced to an "ideal argument," their notions of argument become more and more restricted. While this can be good (because it provides models for those beginning), it limits the possibilities of all of the divergent notions of argument.
In the next paragraph, when Lanham says "when rhetoric empowers literature, it is unredeemable. That is what rhetorical literature, I am tempted to say Western literature, is all about," I jump back up here, and then back down there, and then back up here. I wonder if Lanham is suggesting something here about the essentialist notions of humanity... In other words, as long as advocacy for rhetoric carries the baggage of essentialism (like literature as always being boiled down to saying something about the human condition), it will never get beyond the weak defense?
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Andtheycreateaconcomitantproblem,oneRichardMcKeon,inadiscussiontobenoticedlater,findscharacteristicofourowntime:they renderproblematictherelationofthoughttoaction.Thoughtnowhaditsowndisciplinaryarena.
Is this one of the ways we get to the (mis)understanding that words have no material consequences (i.e. "it's just words, folks")?
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attractors
This term, "attractor," comes up quite a bit in this reading, and I'm not entirely clear on what it means. I can deduce that an "attractor" might be a focus point to which a group is drawn (for example, Rickert later writes, "In the case of the sophists and glib talkers, that would mean that increased discursive sophistication was an attractor for their situations" (358)). But, because it comes up quite a few times in different contexts (especially in crucial moments such as "But if rhetoric is not the achievement of an idea of how to persuade, but rather the growing recognition and discourse about what is an attractor given certain social complexities..." (367)), should this be a term I have a more comprehensive understanding of?
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Words rcl'er to ideas, not things, and Locke regards simple or primary ideas, those which result from ele-mental perceptions, as universal, just as scns~1tion is universal.
I just flat-out don't get this, and I think this is why I struggle so much with Englightment thinkers, particularly Descartes. Aren't sensations a result of "things"? We smell things, we touch things, we see things, etc... I get the notion of "well, we see a bunch of trees and that gives us a way of defining what a tree is even though no tree is the perfect tree," but I also don't get it...
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Locke's philosophy, positing as it did the universality of sensation and ideas, had not only suggested that knowledge was based on human nature but had also rein-forced the belief that human nature in fact existed. In a fundamental sense, it ap-peared, all people were lhe same.
So much emphasis on "universality" during the Enlightenment. Should it be mentioned that a sentence like "all people were the same" is still subjected to norms and standards? In other words, it seems inclusive, but is actually very restrictive, full of norms and standards.
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foucault.info foucault.info
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We must digest it: otherwise it will merely enter the memory and not the reasoning power [in memoriam non in ingenium].
Can a lot of this be then turned back around on the reading process as well (not just writing and meditating)? So, we read, then we write, then sometimes, even years later, go back and re-read with new knowledge and from a new perspective?
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One takes the form of a linear “series”: it goes from meditation to the activity of writing and from there to gumnazein, that is, to training and trial in a real situation —a labor of thought, a labor through writing, a labor in reality. The other is circular: the meditation precedes the notes which enable the rereading which in turn reinitiates the meditation.
Even though the latter is more recursive, both of these suggest (one more so than the other) that the writer eventually reaches some final "real" product, leaving the writing behind once the action has occurred. I wonder if this is limiting the recursive nature (and power) of writing and thinking. But...I find any notion of a linear thinking/writing process suspect.
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drive.google.com drive.google.com
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attack
This seems to be getting so far away from the (Sophistic?) idea that rhetoric creates knowledge... Bummer.
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For the Sophists, there arc nu privileged nonrhctorical discourses und no privileged nonrhctorical knowledge.
I'm a bit confused by this sentence. At first glance, it seems like it's saying the Sophists do not believe in privileging any discourses because it fits in a specific community's constructed "value-laden worldview[s]" (which is a wonderful idea, albeit near impossible?). But, then I trip over the word "nonrhetorical." Is it just a weird way of saying "Just because Community A would define this language as rhetorical and Community B would not does not mean that Community B has some better insight to what rhetoric is..."? This sentence makes me rethink this whole paragraph...
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The rhetorical figures, like the topics of invention, can be seen as parallel to human thought processes.
This reminds me, as it rightfully should, of Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By. But they take it beyond the figurative-speech-as-heuristic by stating that metaphors are the fundamental structures through which we conceptualize the world. So, in a metaphor like "Time is money," the word "is" serves as a placeholder (I think they use the term "shorthand") for a full range of experiences.
This is probably more important later on, though...
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