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)?

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."

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...?

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."

Definition: An image or representation of someone or something.

BITZER! VATZ!

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.

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?

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.

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.

Like Edbauer, Rickert connects rhetoric to place -- locations work rhetorically, and communication happens in and through those places.

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).

And Anzaldúa's "topic" and "place" is the borderlands rather than clearly marked and separated realms (?).

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.

Definition: A contradiction between two beliefs or conclusions that are in themselves reasonable; a paradox.

So is there like a flow chart for this.... or a choose-your-own-adventure book... ???

Definition: An organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts.

Is this part of what Vatz calls "arbitration"?

Which would be that "text as object" assumption Biesecker wants to move away from?

sophist_monster, is this a vertical or horizontal stretch? OR MULTI-DIRECTIONAL???

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...

Sounds very Corder-ish.

Weltanschauung: world view, philosophy of life.

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.

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).

I think Campbell, Nietzsche, Burke, and Booth (just to name a few) would disagree with this.

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?

Kairos?

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.

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).

http://www.nytimes.com/1983/04/17/us/test-on-street-language-says-it-s-not-grant-in-that-tomb.html

This is amazing.

The style is the argument?

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?

Definition: A manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing.

This seems to overturn Derrida's emphasis on written words as the place for (white) linguistic study.

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).

Do you guys remember the beer summit after Gates was arrested while entering his own house?

A resource?

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).

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.

"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....

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.

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?

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.

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."

Just like a serious man.

How closely can we align Nietzsche's rational man and intuitive man to these descriptions?

Have you ever actually thought about the cover image chosen for this movie?

Violence.

Definitions: the partially shaded outer region of the shadow cast by an opaque object; a peripheral or indeterminate area or group.

Rhetoric is not only a force, but also a (dynamic) place.

Would you say that it is...weak...?

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).

This feels a lot Burke's concept of "identification," which pushed the traditionally conceived ethos (establishing credibility/authority) toward consubstantiality (establishing a relationship).

"Invention always occurs" (17).

The parenthetical nature of this comment (opposite Cixous?) seems to undercut his entire argument. To love is to listen, too. RIGHT?

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).

That is arrangement.

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?

We've come a long way since the days of "invention belongs to science, not rhetoric."

Memory plays tricks on the narratives we write and share.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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).

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?").

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.

Definition: the study of malformations or serious deviations from the normal type in developing organisms

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."

The "re" on this feels a bit redundant. Isn't a duplication already a "re"making of something? Oh, linguistics...

Definition

Also see this Wiktionary page for etymology and additional definitions.

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.

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).

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.

Ironic because the institution wants "beginnings" to be commemorated, but then quickly criticizes them?

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).

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.

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.

On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

Sally Miller Gearhart's (highly contested) "The Womanization of Rhetoric" (1979) takes on the conquest and conversion models of rhetoric in a similar way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not quite sure how this got here. What is the actual connection to the body?

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).

See Drew Leder's The Absent Body.

There might be some really fascinating intersections with his phenomenological investigation of disembodiment.

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)

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

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.

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."

World → sensory perception → idea → word.

"Norm, Measure of All Things"

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.

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.

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)

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).

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.

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.

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?

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).

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.

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.

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.

As we've discussed in class quite a few times, "I'm not political" is an incredibly political statement.

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?

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"?

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?

Is he implying here that rhetoric will only do itself a disservice by attaching itself (or attempting to define itself) to other disciplines?

It seems as though this reading vacillates between weak defense and strong defense more than others.

Like Nietzsche -- the reference is a metaphorical nerve stimulus.

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.

https://www.independencedayclothing.com

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."

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...?

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…

Here's a photo of Derrida and a cat, just for reference when we're moving into the 20th century:

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.

Establishing language = establishing truth = establishing community?

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).

The strong defense of the will to power.

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.

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.

No invention happening here!

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.

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.)

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.

This sounds sooooooo booooooring (but also still a thing that happens).

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).

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.

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).

Kind of like our assignments for History of Rhetoric 2.

"All that I know I have stolen" (1063).

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?”

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.

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?

Translation is tricky (and politically charged) business.

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.

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:

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.

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."

New England Heartthrob:

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?

Another (fictional) conspiracy theory concerning the moon landing: Operation Avalanche

"It teaches us, in a word, to admire and to blame with judgment, and not to follow the crowd blindly" (Blair 953).

"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)

Campbell argues pretty heavily for testimony as a solid form of evidence (pages 919-20).

"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)

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)

To what extent do the earliest introductions to norms play into these "rudiments of taste"?

This sounds a lot like current complaints of the interwebs, particularly social media. Everyone's a critic!

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.

It's just a bunch of annotations.

Chapter VIII: Just Take What Chapter VII Said About General Audience Awareness and Use Your Discretion to Make It Specific to More Particular Audiences.

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.

Ah, yes, the weak defense.

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.

Would this paragraph be enough clarification for Locke?

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.

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).

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...).

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?

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."

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.

This sounds an awful lot like invitational rhetoric (which of course has plenty of pitfalls, but still worth considering, I think).

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.

And now here he's switching over to objectivity. If you don't appreciate the classics, there's something wrong with you.

Here, up until halfway through page 833, Hume seems to be playing up subjectivity (well, giving it some room to breathe, anyway).

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...

"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.

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"?

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?

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")?

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?

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...

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.

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?

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.

This seems to be getting so far away from the (Sophistic?) idea that rhetoric creates knowledge... Bummer.

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...

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...