322 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2018
    1. Science does not have that kind of authority any more, assuming, and this is Scott’s important point, we should want for such an authority in the first place.

      Latour: Recalling... or Conceptual Characters? Perhaps Comp. Manifesto..

    2. whiggish

      of, relating to, or characterized by a view which holds that history follows a path of inevitable progression and improvement and which judges the past in light of the present.

  2. May 2017
    1. concealing

      Rather an unfair term. I find a funny video that no one else has seen, I'm not "keeping a secret" as much as I am choosing not to share it.

    2. Recently, Facebook tried to introduce Beacon, a program that would broadcast particular purchases on a user's news feed. This kind of covert advertising, what Ari Melber calls "social advertising," was soundly rejected by users (22). While the messages were touted as innocent recommendations, in actuality they served up commodification and commercialism at the expense of homemaking. By analogy, consider the effect of inhabiting a house with a subclause, more or less unbeknown to you, that allows marketers to publish your purchases as endorsements.

      There is a scene in "The Social Network" when Eduardo and Mark are debating whether or not the site should start gaining revenue... would pair nicely here if I could find it...

    3. This "thinging" power can also be seen in Facebook's "suggestions" for friends. Much like Amazon.com's recommendations of books based on recent book-buying habits, Facebook suggests contacts based on one's current network. On one's profile page, Facebook lists "People You May Know," users who are potential contacts that Facebook has discovered based on one's existing connections. If you click through, Facebook will ask, "Do you know any of these people?

      The machine didn't come up with the algorithm on its own...

    4. Facebook calls forth asynchronous conversations, geo-graphically impossible encounters, minutia of daily existence

      what an exhausting way to live...

    5. bringing them into a false sense of belonging

      In the way that we cannot reduce a bridge to its characteristics (or at least that is how I read Heidegger's irreducibility), or, at most, that it "cannot be reduced to the facts of our making [it]" (p.222), something is indeed lost in the physical, material reality when we look at a screen instead.

      A bridge might look the same on T.V. as it does in reality, but, although its bridge-ness cannot be reduced to its materials, something is surely lost in the radio waves.

    6. The fourth aspect of the fourfold, mortals, is perhaps obvious.

      ehhh I'm not completely convinced that this is true, let alone obvious. Mortals, at least as far as we can create and model these digital realities, play the role of deity more than mortal.

    7. If things gather and bring the world, then digital things afford a subtly different world, not just a different web of ideological meanings within the world.

      Can we really afford to play in digital realities? How much time is spent playing as opposed to working in reality?

    8. Then share the magic moments in beautiful books, colorful calendars, dazzling DVDs, perfect podcasts, and attractive online journals.

      Cute alliteration...

    9. This is a technological solution for a technological problem, and it comes forth from a desire for mastery

      Sounds a bit like Foucault and Chomsky; using our current notions of justice to create an ideal society (or whatever they were yapping on about), fighting fire with fire

    10. Heidegger describes a bridge as gathering the fourfold, he is also saying that neither the fact of humans building it, the purposes to which it is put, the roles it fulfills, nor even the full range of contexts in which it is or could be embedded suffice to capture the bridge in its bridgeness (Harman 124).

      So, in a way, it is but an imitation of a bridge? I'm trying to think of this in terms of Hume's Bundle Theory. Is Heidegger saying that we cannot reduce the things we make to 1. the reason we made them 2. their properties 3. both 4. neither?

    11. The poetic language used accomplishes rhetorical work but does not lend itself to precision.

      Didn't we read something by Aristotle to the effect that nobody uses poetry or fluffy language to do geometry?

    12. Postmodernism requires human cognitive mapping; digital media require the orienting capacities of the human sensorimotor body

      What if we think of this in the way that a Wikipedia article is built, the web-like structure of hyperlinks...

    13. following function, preferring new architectural principals that amount to "a mutation in built space itself' (38). Jameson has received his share of criticism, of course, but what is important here is that the Bonaventure's organization o.fspace functions as a condensation of larger cultural and economic phenomena, most especially late capitalism, that is itself advanced in large part by new technologies and new media. These new spaces are reflective of a profound cultural disorientation. Jameson writes, "This latest mutation in space-postmodern hyper-space-has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of th

      I'm thinking of minimalism...

  3. Apr 2017
    1. apitalist and/or economic interests.

      A bit of a reach to suggest that every human interest is either economic or capitalistic. Then again, I suppose you can boil any interest down to one or the other...

    1. rhetoricalsituation

      A rhetorical question is already answered. Does the correct response to a "rhetorical situation" already exist and it is up to rhetor to "read the prescription accurately?"

    1. of Western thought, continually presenting us with the (skewed) choice between the plain un-varnished truth straightforwardly presented and the powerful but insidious appeal of "fine Ian

      Sounds like science vs. religion

    2. It is the view of the anti-rhetoricians that this double task of inner and outer regulation can be accomplished by linguistic reform, by the institu-tion of conditions of communication that at once protect discourse from the irrelevancies and con-tingencies that would compromise its universal-ity and insulate the discoursing mind from those contingencies and irrelevancies it itself harbors

      Again, all I hear is Foucault warning Chomsky about danger!

    3. defects

      Is eros not a pillar of rhetoric?

      It certainly is not logical, but does that mean it doesn't word, or isn't as good as some other methods of rhetoric?

    4. but we must know the truth [and] we can admit no poetry into our city save only hymns to the gods and the praises of good men; for if you grant admission to the honeyed Muse ... plea-sure and pain will be lords of your city instead of law and that which shall ... have approved itself to the general reason as the best" (607a). The "honeyed muse" is precisely what Belia! be-comes when his tongue drops Manna

      If I do it for you, I have to do it for everyone!

    5. model of language abstracted from any particular performance, or in the project of Es-peranto or some other artificial language claim-ing universality,6 or in the fashioning of a Haber-masian "ideal speech situation" in which all assertions express "a 'rational will' in relation to a common interest ascertained without decep-tion,"1

      Sounds a bit like the Chomsky Foucault debate, using our language to create a language that is somehow above, or superior to our current method.

    6. a language from which all per-5Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scielllific Revo/111io11s (Chicago, 1962), p. 125. [Au.] spectival bias (a redundant phrase) has been eliminated, efforts that have sometimes taken as a model the notations of mathematics, at other times the operations of logic, and more recently the purely formal calculations of a digital com-puter

    7. inner/ outer, deep/ surface, essential/ peripheral, unmediated/ mediated, clear/ colored, necessary/ contingent, straightforward/ angled, abiding/ fleeting, reason/ passion, things/ words, realities/ illusions, fact/ opinion, neutral/ partisan.

      Fish explains these a bit more on p.1612

    8. Born, it would seem, in a posture of defensiveness, rhetoric has often gravitated to-ward this latter view in an effort to defuse the charge that it is amoral

      Forget the chicken and the egg! What came first, the attack or the defense?

    9. the skill of being able to make arguments on either side of a question: "This ... illustrates what is meant by making the worse argument appear the better.

    10. and in the Phaedrus the title figure admits that the "man who plans to be an orator" need not "learn what is really just and true, but only what seems so to the crowd" (260

      Thinking of our class discussion on conspiracy.

    11. The only condition in which speech could really be "free" would be one in which speech meant nothing and was offered for no reason.

      Given what has already been said in the name of Fish, it does not seem that this neutral? language could, or can, be possible.

    12. Except in the artificial en-vironment of a college seminar, all speech is rhetorical or instrumental, intended to accomplish something.

      On the contrary, at least in our moment in time, I would say this is where the argument is grounded. The only problem is that this "artificial environment" doesn't know what it wants to accomplish.

      Would it be too much to suggest that all of rhetoric is situated and purposeful? Or am I a tad late to the party? It seems that much is assumed but we do not state it; perhaps we do so for fear of tying rhetoric down to any feasible definition...

    13. That po-sition is just as untenable, he argues, as the foundationalist position.

      I have begun to wonder whether this text will be worth my time...

    14. Rather, the text is a creation of the community, for what is there is what a particular community agrees or is con-strained to see there. This means that any interpretation that makes sense or is per-suasive is so only because it arises within and is directed to a community that sees or is willing to see the text through the same lens of assumptions about what counts as literature, or even about what words and phrases may mean.

      I'm thinking of Mein Kampf...

  4. Mar 2017
    1. The world wants the quick memo, the rapid-fire electronic mail service; the world wants speed, efficiency, and economy of motion, all goals that, when reached, have given the world less than it wanted or needed. We must teach the world to want otherwise, to want time for care.

    2. Argument, then, is not something we make outside ourselves; argument is what we are. Each of us is an argumen

      Corder is arguing that we are, each of us, an argument. That is hard to argue with.

    1. Such iter-ability-(iter, again, probably comes from itara, other in Sanskrit, and everything that follows can be read as the working out of the logic that ties repetition to alterity) structures the mark of writing itself, no matter what particular type of writing is involved (whether pictographical, hieroglyphic, ideographic, phonetic, alphabetic, to cite the old categories).
    2. context is never absolutely determinable, or rather, why its determination can never be en-tirely certain or saturated. This structural nonsat-uration would have a double effec

      Is debunking our concept of context going to benefit us in anyway? In a Ramist fashion, I wouldn't be surprised if Derrida picked every word apart until our language became obsolete.

    3. by an-alyzing or "deconstructing" texts that contribute to the metaphysics of presence

      I am struggling to imagine a text that does not fall under this category.

    4. Rhetoric focused on motives for speaking that were not intended to reach the ab-solute truth.

      Doesn't this assume that the motive for speaking is to reach the absolute truth?

      Also, is this Truth, or just truth?

    1. There are two reasons for this: first of all, botany and medicine are made up of errors as well as truths, like any other discipline-errors which are not residues or foreign bodies but which have positive functions,

    2. what he sketches out, even by way of pro-visional drafts, as an outline of the oeuvre, and what he lets fall by way of commonplace re-marks-this whole play of differences is pre-scribed by the author-function, as he receives it from his epoch, or as he modifies it in hi

      born again

    3. The infinite rippling of commentaries is worked from the inside by the dream of a repe-tition in disguise: at its horizon there is perhaps nothing but what was at its point of departure-mere recitation.
    4. Yet already a century later the highest truth no longer resided in what dis-course was or did, but in what it said: a day came when truth was displaced from the ritualized, ef-ficacious, and just act of enunciation, towards the utterance itself, its meaning, its form, its object, its relation to its reference.

      This appears to be the reason for Foucault's apprehension about beginnings or introduction.

    5. I should like it to be all around me like a calm, deep transparence, infinitely open, where others would fit in with my expectations, and from which truths would emerge one by one; I should only have to let myself be carried, within it and by it, like a happy wreck."

      carried by the conversation

    6. an obscure web of things, and a manifest, visible, colored chain of words; I would like to show that discourse is not a slen-der surface of contact, or confrontation, between a reality and a language (langue), the intrication of a lexicon and an experience; I would like to show with precise examples that in analyzing discourses themselves, one sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so tight, of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practice.

      A spider follows a set of rules when making a web. If it fails to do so, it becomes the Crack Spider's Bitch.

    1. Part of the resistance against making decisions comes from our fear of giving up options.

      euchre, screw the dealer: ...if no trump is selected, it is a misdeal, and the deal is passed clockwise unless it was agreed upon to play screw the dealer, an option that involves forcing the dealer to choose a trump.

    1. straighten out the details of Falkland's turbulent history, rather than to condemn the man.

      that's totally why you open a big book of Romanticism... to straighten out the details...

      DUUUHHHHH OKAY!

    1. Maria falls in love with him via his marginalia.

      falls in love with Darnford because of what he wrote in the margins of his books that she is reading

    1. pend also for their effectiveness upon the purely technical means of communica-tion, which can either aid the utterance or hamper it. For a "good" rhetoric neglect

      "A script in the sense of true writing, as understood here, does not consist of mere pictures, of representations of things, but is a representation of an utterance, of words that someone says or is imagined to say."

      -Ong

    2. Our words for particular "jobs" under capitalist in-dustrialism refer to acts, but often the element of action is reduced to a minimum and the element of sheer motion raised to a maximum.

      rather economic wouldn't you say?

    3. onsider with what fidelity she had set the scene for this pattern of severance as she stepped beyond the railing to make her announcement. Design: chairman and fellow members within the pale, sitting, without hats and overcoats-she outside the pale, standing, with coat over her arm preparatory to departure. She had strategically modified the arrangement of the scene in such a way that it implicitly (ambiguously) contained the quality of her act.

      My roommate and I discussed the correlation of, relatively, important characters, or characters with the most air time, in the show The Office in relation to the office of Michael Scott

    4. For he could have "gone on" only by abandoning drama for some more "scientific" form.

      Appears to be what rhetoric has been doing in recent centuries...

    5. And thereby, in his human-itarian zeal to save mankind, the novelist portrays characters which, in being as brutal as their scene, are not worth saving

      the agent must follow the quality of the scene. Why does the quality of the scene not follow the quality of the agent?

      scene = egg; agent = chicken... which comes first?

      EDIT: ...nevermind... I think he answers it in the next sentence... read before you write!

    6. The paintings of the pointillist Seurat carry the sense of consis-tency between scene and agent to such lengths that his human figures seem on the point of dis-solving into their background.

      Something like organizing Latour's notebooks into some recognizable volume.

    7. One could not deduce the details of the action from the de-tails of the setting, but one could deduce the quality of the action from the quality of the set-ting.

      Fair.

    8. Or imagine that one were to manipulate the terms, for the imputing of motives, in such a case as this: The hero (agent) with the help of a friend (coagent) outwits the villain (counteragent) by using a file (agency) that enables him to break his bonds (act) in order to escape (purpose) from the room where he has been confined (scene). In se-lecting a casuistry here, we might locate the mo-tive in the agent, as were we to credit his escape to some trait integral to his personality, such as "love of freedom."

      @sophist_monster

      In asking "what would you do if you were Platonic Socrates," I still find that there are high stakes in answering yes or no... perhaps some integral trait to your personality.

    9. Men may violently disagree about the purposes behind a given act, or about the charac-ter of the person who did it, or how he did it, or in what kind of situation he acted; or they may even insist upon totally different words to name the act itself.

    1. In brief, we have to guess them and we guess much better when we realize we are guess-ing, and watch out for indications, than when we think we know.7

      Burke appears to believe the same; if you realize that what you're are doing is rhetorical, then your rhetoric will be good, or better.

    2. Good use is the general, present-day practice of the best writers." One bone we could pick would be with that "best." How are they the best writers except by using the words in the best ways? We settle that they are the best writers because we find them using their words successfully. We do not settle that theirs is the right, the "good usage" of the words because they use them so.
    3. It was Aristotle who said that there can be no natural connection between the sound of any language and the things signi-fied, and, if we set the problem right side up and remember the other words before examining it, we shall have to agree with him.
    4. It is as though we were to maintain that I apples are healthy because6 wise people eat them, instead of recognizing that it is the other way about-that it is what the food will do for us which makes us eat it, not the fact that we eat it which makes it good food.

      @sophist_monster

      "polite literature" and buying a car simply for the snob value as opposed to buying it because it is good

    5. I am talking now, you have usually to wait till I have gone on a bit before you can decide how you will understand the opening parts of the sentences. If, instead, 1 were reading you the firi,,t few theorems of Euclid, that would not be so. You would understand, as soon as I said "a tri-angle," what the word meant, and though what I went on to say might qualify the meaning ("hav-ing two sides equal"), it would not dei,,troy or completely change the meaning that you had so far given to the word. But in most prose, and more than we ordinarily 1,,uppm,e, the opening words have to wait for thrn,e that follow to settle what they shall mean-if indeed that ev

      wasn't someone babbling about anal word placement in our readings weeks ago?

      I can't remember who it was...

    6. I 5~ is behaving or·thinking with a concept-not, of course, of one. Its act is abstractive and general; disregards in some respects the fonner situations and so is abstractive, and applies in some re-spects not to one single thing but to any of a sort and so is general. The theorem settles the Eighteenth-Century problem by standing it on its head. That problem was, How do we manage, from this particular concrete thing and that particular concrete thing and the other particular concrete thing, to arrive at the general abstract anything? The theorem holds that we begin with the general abstract any-thing, split it, as the world makes us, into sorts and then arrive at concrete particulars by the overlapping or common membership of these sorts. This bit of paper here now in my hand is a concrete particular to us so far as we think of it as paperish, hereish, nowish, and in my hand; it is the more concrete as we t

      Bundle Theory

    7. What is the connection between the mind and the world by which events in the mind mean other events in the world?

      Gerard de Nerval:

      "I have never felt any rest in sleep. For a few seconds I am numbed, then a new life begins, freed from the conditions of time and space, and doubtless similar to that state which awaits us after death. Who knows if there is not some link between those two existences and if it is not possible for the soul to unite them now?"

    8. Those who allow beyond question that there arc people like themselves also interpreting signs and open to study should not find it difficult to admit that their observation of the behaviour of others may provide at least a framework within which their own introspection,

      Description

    9. And what are words but toys and sweetmeats for grown-up ba-bies who call themselves men?

      [Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

      But, alas! husbands, as well as their helpmates, are often only overgrown children; nay, thanks to early debauchery, scarcely men in their outward form—and if the blind lead the blind, one need not come from heaven to tell us the consequence.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUrhOmH5-18)

    10. ut for the analysis of the senses of "meaning" with which we are here chiefly concerned, it is desirable to begin with the relations of thoughts, words, and things as they are found in cases of reflective speech un-complicated by emotional, diplomatic, or other disturbances; and with regard to these, the indi-rectness of the relations between words and things is the feature which first deserves atten-tion.

      Is this Lanham's girl without makeup?

    11. Meaning may thus be depen-dent on context, but some contexts, it seems, are more appropriate than others.

      "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

      (Animal Farm, Orwell)

    12. o field of study seemed for-eign to him, and his many books and articles are marked by his continuing enthusi-asm for psychology, linguistics, anthropology, information theory, and philosophy.

      Gor. Some answers, Socrates, are of necessity longer; but I will do my best to make them as short as possible; for a part of my profession is that I can be as short as any one.

      Soc. That is what is wanted, Gorgias; exhibit the shorter method now, and the longer one at some other time.

      Gor. Well, I will; and you will certainly say, that you never heard a man use fewer words.

      Soc. Very good then; as you profess to be a rhetorician, and a maker of rhetoricians, let me ask you, with what is rhetoric concerned: I might ask with what is weaving concerned, and you would reply (would you not?), with the making of garments?

      Gor. Yes.

      Soc. And music is concerned with the composition of melodies?

      Gor. It is.

      Soc. By Here, Gorgias, I admire the surpassing brevity of your answers.

      Gor. Yes, Socrates, I do think myself good at that.

      Soc. I am glad to hear it; answer me in like manner about rhetoric: with what is rhetoric concerned?

      Gor. With discourse.

      Soc. What sort of discourse, Gorgias?-such discourse as would teach the sick under what treatment they might get well?

      Gor. No.

      Soc. Then rhetoric does not treat of all kinds of discourse?

      Gor. Certainly not.

      Soc. And yet rhetoric makes men able to speak?

      Gor. Yes.

      Soc. And to understand that about which they speak?

      Gor. Of course.

      Soc. But does not the art of medicine, which we were just now mentioning, also make men able to understand and speak about the sick?

      Gor. Certainly.

      Soc. Then medicine also treats of discourse?

      Gor. Yes.

      Soc. Of discourse concerning diseases?

      Gor. Just so.

      Soc. And does not gymnastic also treat of discourse concerning the good or evil condition of the body?

      Gor. Very true.

      Soc. And the same, Gorgias, is true of the other arts:-all of them treat of discourse concerning the subjects with which they severally have to do.

      Gor. Clearly.

      Soc. Then why, if you call rhetoric the art which treats of discourse, and all the other arts treat of discourse, do you not call them arts of rhetoric?

      Gor. Because, Socrates, the knowledge of the other arts has only to do with some sort of external action, as of the hand; but there is no such action of the hand in rhetoric which works and takes effect only through the medium of discourse. And therefore I am justified in saying that rhetoric treats of discourse.

      Soc. I am not sure whether I entirely understand you, but I dare say I shall soon know better; please to answer me a question:-you would allow that there are arts?

      Gor. Yes.

      Soc. As to the arts generally, they are for the most part concerned with doing, and require little or no speaking; in painting, and statuary, and many other arts, the work may proceed in silence; and of such arts I suppose you would say that they do not come within the province of rhetoric.

      Gor. You perfectly conceive my meaning, Socrates.

    1. here will be time for that when I have decided whether she has a pen in her hand or a pickaxe.

      O! That time old choice! I oft forgeteth which thou art to use!

    2. The answer lies at present locked in old diaries, stuffed away in old draw-ers, half-obliterated in the memories of the aged. It is to be found in the lives of the obscure-in those almost unlit corridors of history where the figures of generations of women are so dimly, so fitfully perceived.
    3. so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living.

      More Rimbaud:

      "Would his good and his charity alone give him the right to live in the real world?"

      Season in Hell

    4. She was intensely sympa-thetic. She was immensely charming. She was ut-terly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it-in short she was so consti-tuted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all- I need not say it-she was pure.

      Sounds an awful lot like Rimbaud's Season in Hell

    5. independent of male support

      From Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication:

      "Consequently, the most perfect education, in my opinion, is such an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart. Or, in other words, to enable the individual to attain certain habits of virtue as will render it independent. In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of reason."

    6. Moreover, Woolf believes that the principal language available for literary and intellectual expression has been "the language of men,"s so long used to express only men's concerns that women have difficulty adapting it to their needs.

    1. Also showing Lamy's inllucncc is Astcll'!. view that one needs little stylistic ornament because people arc naturally attracted to truth if they can sec it clearly.

      You shouldn't need to wear too much makeup/use too much rhetoric, you are naturally beautiful/telling the truth.

      Would I be wrong in assuming that she expects the reader to use rhetoric strictly for noble purposes?

  5. Feb 2017
    1. He understands the principles of linguistic change-for example, the tendency for slang terms to be-come part of the reputable vocabulary-and he addresses a practical problem that teachers of rhetoric have yet to solve, namely, the conflict between descriptive lin-guistics and the need to leach usage.