seems like this is used to justify why a character is odd

This dude read in his closet

This flies in the face of Camus: "Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."

Man is the master of the world

Important to note is that it is man's understanding of languages which other animals make but cannot understand across biological family.

This would be complicated by the fact that animals are doing all sorts of communication we have no idea about.

I applaud Sheridan's attempt to enlighten our understanding of language in this way. He paints himself into a corner, but rather than stopping, he just keeps painting.

Well Mr. Sheridan, what would you say about a big crazy dogbear thing that screams like a woman?

Seriously, Annihilation (the movie more than the book, but the book, too) is interested in the blending of species and how the human responds when the nice, neat categories of existence are muddied.

So while words vary widely and have no direct relation to the ideas they represent, tone is universal. Here we have another claim about the human: it is one who uses tone in a certain way.

Yeah someone who was speaking about being irate and used only words, no tone or movement, would seem like a sociopath.

This seems like a break from Locke, and possibly even from Hume.

A hu(man) has things other than ideas running through its mind.

whoa, wait a minute. Is this some sleight of hand, or did I miss something?

This seems like an amplification of his previous thought, a stronger claim than what has come before. Up to this point, I understood Sheridan as saying "not all language is spoken words." Fair enough, but now his claim that "words are only a part of language because of custom, and language could exist just as well without words at all" is a considerable raising of the stakes.

Did I miss something?

So while Sheridan praises Locke for his step in the right direction, he also names him as complicit in the problem because it is tempting to stop with the progress Locke made, rather than carrying out the project to its end.

Sheridan wants to apply Locke's findings on the language of "philosophical discourse" to all language.

"how dreadful to have wisdom when it profits not the wise."

We can certainly get behind this, right? Language, viewed narrowly, leads to a limited use of language. Viewed broadly, language is opened to new possibilities.

So those who can speak tend to believe that writing is merely a sign for speech, but both speech and writing are signs for thought.

Ok, I don't know that Locke would disagree, but Sheridan is specifically including the vocal chords and limbs, that is, the body, in the sphere of the rhetorical.

You know what, I just realized that I was assuming something that I don't think Sheridan is. In my comment about the populous of Rome being virtuous, I was assuming Sheridan was attempting to educate the populous. I think I'm wrong.

It seems Sheridan has virtue training in mind for a select few, not all of "the British."

If we know anything about ancient Rome, it's that the populous was religious, moral, lovers of the arts and law. /s

A medicinal model of education. "Hi, I'm Thomas Sheridan. All these dumbasses are hopelessly lost because they don't speak correctly. They'll never do anything good, or see what good is, because bad speech runs rampant. The only hope is to heal them by teaching them to speak well. That is, like me."

These illustrations and explanations read a lot like an attempt to explain how to swim to someone on dry land.

Again the (Platonic) ranking of the spiritual over the physical.

Ok, she was starting to lose me, but this clause brings me back. She told us above that everyone has their station in life; this is her section on everyone's rhetorical or educational station.

shucks

So meditation not only brings clarity of thought, but sanctification. I wonder how closely the two are related for Astell?

Another classic Christian move, making education of not just earthly, but eternal importance.

What a classic Christian move. "You think what is good? Oh, yeah, yeah, Christianity is like a super saiyan version of that."

It's really cool to see "reduce" used this way. I've never seen it like this in English, but it makes perfect sense.

"duce" is from "ducere" which means "to lead." "reduce" is "to lead again."

Actually, now that I ponder it, I'm having trouble seeing the metaphor we employ when we use it today.

Edit: Holy smokes ok so the metaphor is "leading back to a more primordial state." Fascinating.

The Christian duty to love the neighbor

Here it is with a "u."

I'm beginning to think the contemporary insistence (can I say "fanaticism?") with spelling is just that: contemporary.

Perhaps another gift from Strunk and White.

While she may disagree with him in other places, this sounds like a statement where the two are in Lockestep (please forgive me.)

This is a very rigid curriculum which tells us much about what Astell believes the human (or perhaps here just the woman, but I think it applies to humanity generally) to be. In particular, the wretchedness of a sinner, left unchecked, will lead to false ideas and bad beliefs and habits. "A true Christian" will need to have falsity and sin constantly called out and checked as she gradually learns to prefer what is really good, true, beautiful, etc.

A sort of reverse tabula rasa. While this could be a sort of flourish, I don't read it as one.

If we take her at her word, Astell is suggesting that those (rational) capacities which are originally inherit to humans, can, through disuse, gradually recede into nothing.

I have lots of questions about how the hell it got there in the first place and how it goes away etc., but I suspect it has something to do with the imago Dei and the Fall.

This contraction, which I associate with slang, juxtaposed with such high-brow language is jarring.

ok wtf this sentence is massive and contains a really complicated metaphor. This is how she spoke?

I'm not hating; I'm amazed.

Proverbs 24:33-34 King James Version (KJV) 33 Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep:

34 So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth; and thy want as an armed man.

So I got through the biography and came out thinking Astell was timid, conservative and restrained. These are some pretty accusatory and forthright questions she is asking.

This seems like a pretty direct appeal to Princess Anne, to whom the book is dedicated and who nearly gave Astell money to start a college.

I'm really glad she thought women should write as they spoke, rather than with an inflated style. If this first sentence is plainspeak, I'm not sure I could handle much verbosity.

I get what is meant here, but there is at least one way in which it doesn't hold up.

Astell didn't claim women should speak in public speeches, yet she wrote publicly.

pray thee, do tell: which books are good?

Well, I feel awesome.

Christianity has rules for rhetoric. Interesting. Augustine would love this, yeah?

How radical was this in Astell's day? In any event, she's said that the pulpit is not the place for a woman, so she uses books to exhort women.

I mean I guess nobody's perfect

I'm no historian, so help me out here, but this is radical, right? I mean, even the institutions which taught boys had a supervisory hierarchy, right?

I heard once that Noah Webster subscribed to this view of all languages coming from one ancient language, but I can't find any source to corroborate that.

"omit needless words!"

A refrain of Strunk's. This Sprat fellow sounds like he would get along with Strunk and White.

Weak defense

"How dreadful to have wisdom when it profits not the wise!" -Tiresias, one of the plays of Sophocles

Lots of cultivation going on for Vico. Community cultivates young, community cultivates language, language cultivates community, language cultivates young.

So Vico's definition and practice of rhetoric allows for one's self to be both the agent and subject of eloquence. Interesting.

or "has the aim of truth coursing though all his blood vessels," to reintroduce a metaphor Vico used earlier.

He is defining prudence by turning scientific inquiry on its head (or just pointing out that prudence is scientific inquiry on its head).

Look at the seed he is sowing right there.

As an autodidact, he would know!

These three stages are not the same as the Trivium, but they do seem to pair nicely, particularly if you understand the Trivium in a sort of developmental way as explained by Dorthy Sayers that is all the rage in classical education these days.

I knew Aristotle was hanging around here somewhere.

The Golden Mean)

I'm picking up some serious Strong Defense vibes from this. The study of eloquence builds a community, a world.

I'm in.

So I think he's saying that permanence emerges from an admission that things change. That seems like something we could put to work.

TOM CLANCY at sixty.

Ah, so any group of people that does "long err in their affection for a favorite epic or tragic author" isn't a part of civilization.

Awesome. /s

This is still humanism, but perhaps a humbler humanism. Descartes still looms large. The objective capital T truth is still out there somewhere, and we can tell that it is perceived because of the universal rules, but the human is fundamentally not the kind of thing that can perfectly perceive objective reality because the organs of internal sensation don't work well enough, or reliably enough.

Here you are, mholder.

Write poetry, judge poetry better.

This is granting, of course, that you are "a man of sense."

This is stuffed to the gills with assumptions. And while there is a good deal of boilerplate Enlightenment business going on, Hume also seems to be planting the seeds later authors will reap.

Hume is requiring of the listener/taster/receiver, which is not new. "You think rap is good because you don't understand 'art' " is a common refrain. The elites have always used exposure to canonical works and forms as a method of discrediting those outside the circle, and have dismissed emerging works and forms as "lowbrow."

What strikes me about Hume, and perhaps posthumanism (along with Foucault) would find this noteworthy, is that this "violence on" a person is not done by the community, but by the person themself.

And just like that, Barad and Siegert come crashing in. Practices shape the agent, yeah yeah yeah, but as the agent continues to practice, the world is shaped as well.

Even though there are those in the room who aren't fans of Plato, I'm reminded of his description of the philosopher here, where he likens the philosopher to the only one who understands navigation by the stars on a ship full of people. The other sailors laugh and deride the "stargazer," because he seems foolish to them. But of course, the philosophers are right and the sailors are wrong.

Granted, this may just be a highly stylized and ancient form of "I'm rubber, you're glue."

this is the sort of reasoning often employed in continuing to teach the Western Canon.

I'm not exactly sure what to do with this yet, but I want to note that here, Hume is comfortable speaking metaphorically of the human as a machine. In the older stuff, agricultural metaphors are preferred.

It's Latin.

De gustibus non est disputandum

just like Locke's story about liquor, which was the worst liquor story I ever heard.

Lad Tobin, in Writing Relationships (it's a composition pedagogy book), talks about how making an increasingly complex rubric of evaluation of a paper leads to increasing scrutiny, but that doesn't produce better writing, just more disagreement between teacher and student.

That may only be tangentially related, but this essay seems like it might be a fun one to read in light of composition and how we teach it.

Kinda got real cranky and pedantic at the end. Calm down, Locke.

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal."

Barad immediately comes to mind; I'm thinking of her charge to doubt the Cartesian scheme in order that it does not continue to exist.

practices, geography, time period, class etc. etc.

I'm really glad to see Locke say here that people can trick themselves with language. That whole bit at the beginning where one doesn't need "the right" words to communicate to oneself as long as the words are consistent seemed completely untenable to me.

Language shapes thought, even (especially?) one's own thought. As a member of a society, the language of others places all sorts of limits on our thoughts, and shapes them accordingly.

story time.

"&" is a contraction of sorts of "et," the Latin word meaning "and." "&" used to be at the end of the alphabet, and was pronounced "and." When people would say the alphabet, they'd say "y, z, and per se 'and'." Over time, "and per se and" was corrupted to "ampersand."

And then everyone clapped

Sweet, Locke.

Now do "human."

This is a pretty decent title for a biography of Locke.

While Locke seems to favor the capital T Truth, he here says that nobody is the authority on it.

This kinda sounds like a posthuman critique of humanism.

ex. "posthumanism"

I'm screaming "Beetle" at the screen at this point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x86hLtOkou8

Bouba/kiki effect

from re- meaning "again" and cor, "heart." The word was originally active ("I call it back to my heart"), but over time took a passive form ("It is recalled back to my heart") in the Latin. Funny that it has retaken an active sense in English.

But of note for me is the fact that the word, albeit metaphorical, has an origin in the life of the body, not the mind.

Plato: "You can't give long answers or talk funny. Just give it to me straight, without all the obfuscation."

HU clap MA clap NI clap SM clap

"this shit sucks. There is certainly some ideal way it ought to work, so lets make it better and better because we can and we know how things work and how they ought to and we're smart and in control!!!"

What's the posthuman approach to language, in short? Maybe we can substitute words to come up with a different way of seeing it, like "one task of rhetoric is to invigorate language."

lol @ this.

"creating obscurities through disputation" sounds an awful lot like "broadening the knowledge base of humanity." Arguing toward ever more precise ideas and their articulations is the driving force of the Enlightenment.

"preceding" is doing a lot of work there. That sounds an awful lot like Barad.

This is what sparked Lanham's chapter, right? The affirmation of the authority/superiority of the book itself over other media as a means to "preserve culture."

That's massive.

The ontological/ontic debate has existed within the ontological. Siegert's theory of cultural techniques moves it into the ontic. Put another way, it resolves the debate by demonstrating the ontic as ontologically prior to ontology.

I suspect many other words could also fit here, such as "technology."

I've only ever seen Heidegger use this term, and it meant something like "real-stuff-in-the-world-as-it-is" instead of ontological, which meant "nature-decided-upon-ahead-of-time-because-of-categories-we-made-up."

So I just finished the article then looked at my wall and thought about the relation of me and the wall being prior to either me or the wall and my face melted off.

this is an easy way to grab ahold of what Barad is after in this section. "Agency" isn't something someone has. Agency is action, not attribute.

Matter doesn't need to be observed. This is how she is avoiding relativism. She's grounding her ontology in the natural world.

Notice the lack of reference to some "scientific observer" outside of the system who could "measure" meaning. She only refers to what is going on in the actual world.

clearly

Is discourse seen as enforcing "hard" or "soft" boundaries? A hard boundary might be something outside of which all sense is lost, like "stars function mustard." A soft boundary might be something forbidden by custom, decorum, etc., like complaining about your spouse to a person who very recently lost their spouse in an accident.

cf. Wittengstein's "beetle"

super helpful summary. Commenting just to tag it.

I believe this is important, but I'm not sure I understand it. While the Cartesian cut happens before the relation, because relata are ontologically prior and independent of relations, the agential cut happens within the relation, distinguishing subject and object locally, but not ontologically.

Oh ok ok, and because those relata are then separable, exteriority-within-phenomena happens. Essentially, because the relata can be seen as separate objects within the relation, objectivity is still possible; relativism is not a necessary result.

Since forever, apparently, science has relied on Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover," in a sense. Not a god exactly, but some real or imagined unaffected observer whose presence serves as a fixed point from which to accumulate data. Why are we tempted to think this way? Aren't we all moving? What fixed point is there? I'm tempted to go back to the analogy of floating baskets tied together. There is an illusion of being grounded, but we aren't really.

Diffracting these studies through one another? This seems to be exactly what Braidotti was after in her description of "posthumanities."

clearly

At least she reminds us that she knows how hard this all is for us mere mortals.

Dr. Rivers, please freaking help.

Am I reading Barad right? Is she saying here "If not only the internal workings of the mind of the subject and the subjects actions are shaped by performativity, but also the physical compilation of the universe, then it is all the more important that we understand performativity and how it causes this shaping of the physical world."

from "ex" "vacuare" meaning "to make empty or to empty"

Ok, I think this is it. This is her whole thing; her thesis. And it is one hell of a thesis.

lol, but for real, what Barad is suggesting really is difficult to do, or at least I'm finding it difficult to do.

We believe words are more understandable and apprehensible than the physical world. We believe words are more understandable and apprehensible than the physical world. We believe words are more understandable and apprehensible than the physical world. . .

It seems crazy because our society is so science and tech driven, but she's right. We believe words to be prior (ontologically) to the world around us because they are a part of "us," our own minds.

Distorting Descartes's famous thought experiment here seems to help me understand this. While I suspect the average person could be pushed into admitting the possibility of an evil demon spinning an elaborate hoax for you, deceiving your physical senses and tricking your brain, I can't imagine finding anyone who would admit the opposite. The opposite would be that the external world exists largely as you perceive it. The demon is not manipulating your experience of the natural world at all. Instead, he is tricking you into believing you exist.

We're so Cartesian we can't even conceive of it being otherwise. Perhaps Spinoza would help here, as well as other monist ontologies?

Someone please redeem this annotation I don't even know what is happening anymore.

"Language has been given too much power."

I'm finding it helpful to repeat that phrase when I don't understand what she means.

"What is" instead of "which one?"

There is a thing that exists before and apart from all talking/practices/gestures toward/about that thing.

Summary: Social constructivist theories of knowledge aren't helpful because they get caught up in bouncing ideas around. Performative theories are better and ought to be considered, because they are practice-focused. Barad is offering them for consideration.

commenting just to tag this

But this is accelerationsism, right?

This quote makes me think of a poem by Robinson Jeffers: Shine, Perishing Republic

While I'm sure Jeffers wasn't after furthering the cause of posthumanism, it seems like an especially interesting piece to give a posthuman reading to.

Now, someone please do that because I do not understand how the hell to do it.

The preamble was worth the payoff. This is gold; a succinct statement that outlines the ethics implicit in posthumanism which necessarily work against advanced capitalism.

I'm looking for space to start a agribusiness screed but Braidotti is doing it better than I can. Wow, she is killing it!

To say it another way (although, why do that, when she just knocked it out of the park?) by borrowing an analogy from economics, knowledge production is a series of floating baskets, all fluctuating together. There is no firm base that everything is built on, the structure persists by virtue of its relations of its coherent parts, one to another.

This is an interesting adjective to include in the list that I don't often see in the usual list. But I'm not well read on the subject either.

People who know better than I do: Do you often see "urbanized" among the list of attributes of "the majority?"

Melvil Dewey: "Guess I'll forget the base 10 number system and switch to hexadecimal."

For real, she's proposing developing knowledge that is outside of Dewey's ordering system. It's like 150 years old; it's about time!

From Dr. Rivers's lecture: "When you start defining what human is, you start excluding people."

Excellent choice of word. "Inspiration" from "in-spirare", meaning "to breathe into."

this is an important point to just slip in like this. The Law of Excluded Middle is one of the three fundamental laws of Aristotelian logic, that is, Western thought.

boo hiss

Ok if someone would have explained it to me like this in high school I would have had a reason to care about doing them instead of hating them.

important questions she is trying to answer

Like Rickert did.

A Google search yielded this helpful lil summary: materialist approach to rhetoric

the posthumanities are nomadic because they don't fit in traditional disciplinary camps, right?

This guy showed up in the Mucklebauer & Hawhee article, too. He's a pretty important philosopher after Foucault, Derrida, et al.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze

So she's not an American and doesn't teach in America. Sweet.

Perhaps this is a clue to what I was asking above. While there is a way of reading "leftist" critiques of capital as believing themselves to be "apart from capitalistic structures," even if only in their minds/opinions/etc., posthumanism says "look, we're in it. Rejecting it is senseless. Instead, we ought to ask 'now what?'"

Indeed, it might. Might it not?

I'm not being coy or trying to build my annotation count, I'm after something in particular here. Here, experiment and improv are suggested because they might lead to progress. My question is: What fencepost does the posthumanist leave unmoved? Is anything sacred? Is anything best left alone, without being subject to "experiment and improvisation?"

How does this work in tension with what was said earlier about the simulacra not making the real more malleable? It seems like just the opposite is being argued here; that the simulacrum (capital) is turning its own megaphone louder and louder, "changing" the real by "produc[ing] logics of desire."

Anna Moore did it better though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-mQHPIhBzU

l33t hax0r

As information has become more ubiquitous and trivial, an important sense of the word has faded. "Information" is something "put in a form" or something "that forms."

It's fascinating to think about how information forms us, and how outsourcing that also changes us.

Note also that Brooke calls for "a return." This is a great fact to keep in my back pocket for the common misconception of posthumanism as "after human crazy cyborg thingy." No, Brooke, a posthumanist, says "go back."

Will this serve as a suitable definition of "posthumanism," or is it merely what's at stake? This refiguring of relations seems to be what Dr. Rivers is after at times, especially the "move beyond the binary" and "I'm not saying humanism is wrong, I'm just saying we're after something different" talk.

the what?

This is where the Enlightenment, which thinks of divisions and categories as things discovered by the rational mind, is in trouble, because those rational minds start turning inward on themselves.

Ship of Theseus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Like Rickert was talking about, "progress" within one field may ultimately prove not to be best for the field, but be an exaptation which is picked up and put to work somewhere else.

So rhetoric functions like the humans in eXistenZ.

Dude, so meta.

"inventing" as "finding," not as "creating"

useful? for whom?

I can remember playing video games as a youngster, when one day my dad asked me how to play a new game I got. In retrospect, he probably would have caught on a lot sooner if I told him about a third of the controls to begin with. Instead, I told him in excruciating detail how each button might be used. He did not do well.

The triangle may well be tremendously useful to the teacher and student. I think the question I'm after is really an ethical one; something like "How honest ought a teacher be in working with simplistic concepts in any given field?"

Can anyone shed light on how this word functions in rhet studies in general, and in this paragraph in particular?

As it is, I'm reading it as a source or well or magnet that a culture exaptates toward or "adexaptates" to.

The term exaptation is a helpful and essential way of understanding what Rickert is after in this essay. The word comes from evolutionary biology.

It's easiest for me to understand etymologically. Adaptation shares the -apt root, that is, "being fitting." But whereas Ad-aptation is ad or "toward" being fit or useful, Ex-aptation is ex or "away" or "out of" being fit or useful.

Notice the huge difference: fit-ness doesn't happen because an organism or, here, a culture, tries to achieve some goal it has already recognized. Rather, the organism (or culture) stumbles toward fit-ness by repurposing [N.B. I need help here. "Recycling?", "Fortuitously finding use?"] traits (practices, rituals, etc.) which were formerly "apt" for something else.

Ok, so Peter Kingsley made it into the footnotes. I can sleep at night now knowing that my previous annotations weren't completely bogus.

I guess I'll add here that Parmenides, according to Kingsley, was also a healer, a role Kingsley has mentioned multiple times.

deus vult!

The development of "the god card"

development of rhetoric

Writing as invention

Ok I'm gonna double down on Kingsley and his examination of Parmenides and Empedocles. His thesis is that these men are today seen as logicians, but were, in fact, shamans and/or sorcerers.

I'm not exactly how this fits into Rickert's work or our understanding of rhetoric, but the overlap is too much not to annotate it. Ultimately, I guess, I'm including this because Kingsley may be a source of helping us broaden our understanding of the Greeks' understanding of rhetoric. If Kingsley is right, they weren't nearly as obsessed with logic as we understand them to be.

Here's Kingsley's website: Kingsley's website

Parmenides, a pre-socratic, is traditionally seen as a rational philosopher and a "founder of the West." What we know of him comes from Plato, and from bits of a poem Parmenides wrote, On Nature.

Where it gets interesting (sort of), is there are some who suggest Parmenides wasn't rational, but mystical. He wrote his poem, it is said, after having a vision in a cave. He was also said to be a shaman. His claims are hotly debated (sometimes even dismissed as ridiculous), but Peter Kingsley wrote on this understanding of the inception of the West (and its relationship to the East) in his book, Reality.

I'm really not trying to be that guy, but is this a typo? I can't make the sentence make sense without substituting "it is."

We see what you did there, Rickert.

Rhetoric is an achievement, that is, a built or accomplished thing, not an ideal descending from the heavens.

"good man, skilled in speaking"

"Prince's Mirror." It's basically like a bound finishing school for rulers. Think Emily Post for aristocrats.

If you are reading this straight through, I recommend going to page 22 of this document. The last two pages are a helpful recasting of the two defenses which can lend context to the rest of the reading.

This dude wrote this in one day

Yes! This is what I was after in my above reply. The institution has adopted a mindset fit for selling a simple product, a mindset hyperaware of "economic realities" and "efficiencies." It is no wonder the reductionists have stepped in, slashing the production process to the bone. As a result, the product, whatever we say it is, is simplified.

What is the debate here? Is it that decorum, i.e. formality, is necessary vs. it being a weapon used to exclude those who don't "know the rules?"

I don't know where this is going, but this apparent humility seems to be a much better starting point than Blunt's hubris.

Is Steiner saying here that Blunt was enthralled by the tedium of studying fine art, and became a spy so that he could be a hero in his own mind?

This matches well with Lanham's previous summary of Bloom's view of the university:

"a monastery that shuts out a fundamentally corrupt and irredeemable world."

So civilization is this independent actor, and it can get to a person (or only a man) during the four-year college experience through the Great Books.

When studying knowledge in my undergrad and trying to define it, it was a common attempt among me and my peers to continually add more and more qualifiers to the definition, in an attempt to ensure no one had knowledge by accident. My professor continually reminded us: "Dogs and children know things. If your definition of knowledge excludes dogs and children from knowing things, that says more about you than it does them."

What I'm after here, is that Bloom's definition of "civilization" is extremely qualified. It says more about him than it does anyone who doesn't meet his definition.

Boundless gratitude from studying Kant? lol

Ok so here he is saying it isn't just when it comes to literacy, but the curriculum as a whole.

"literary" seems to be the key word here. It meant something quite different to Cicero than it did to, say, Hirsch.

How far should these divisions be walked back and/or rethought? It's been going on a long time; Plato's Socrates suggested education be divided into two subjects: Music and Gymnasium.

I'm surprised to find this claim here, buried in this paragraph. This is the first time Lanham has gotten explicit about what, exactly, will be required to answer the "Q" question, right?

Summary of Hirsch:

1. The founders of America believed the nation must have robust public discourse.
2. Cicero was, for them (and should be for us), the model of robust public discourse.
3. In the Roman republic, discourse was oral.
4. Now, discourse is primarily written.
5. Therefore, "literacy" functions for us the way "rhetoric" did for Cicero.
6. "literacy" is a knowledge of the Canon.
7. A primary responsibility of American schools is to teach the Canon.

Below is an excerpt from the 5030 only reading which sheds light on "dramatistic" as Burke employs the term.

"Kenneth Burke follows a similar path in his work. Discourse of all kinds, he says, seeks to motivate people in some way, so we should seek meaning in intentions and effects. Language is a form of human action: It requires an agent with a purpose, a scene of action, a rhetorical strategy, and an actual speech or text. Seeing discourse this way, "dramatistically" as Burke calls it, is to see all language as motivated, hence as rhetorical. Burke also searches discourse for its ideological function of promoting identification with communities and their beliefs. In his analyses, rhetoric merges with political, psychological, sociological. religious, and aesthetic investigations of human behavior. "

Reminds me of the motive mixing Lanham raved about.

This is embodied learning turned up to 11. This reads like a text debating what happens to the elements of the Eucharist. Reading and writing are transmuted into "the very body" of the one who is doing them.

Something about eating, digesting, all that food becoming one thing, and number 1. No reference to number 2.

Summary:

Don't try to exhaust one area of knowledge with your notebook; that isn't its use. Instead, the value of the notebook lies in your 1) recognition, and 2) internalization of the truth you encounter in your life as you live it. And rather than turning over every stone for some wisdom, go over that which you've already encountered and found worthy of merit. It is good to meditate deeply on few texts.

We may not agree with him, but I'm pretty sure Seneca thought this was horrible. No clue about how Foucault views one who is thinking toward the future.

I read somewhere once that some guy read War and Peace in one sitting. When someone asked him what it was about, he said "It was about Russia."

Kierkegaard argues in The Sickness Unto Death that a human being is a synthesis of opposites; infinite and finite, freedom and necessity, etc. The "self," then, is the relation of these two opposites, and, in addition to that relation relating to each of the opposites, the relation also relates itself to itself.

I think all I'm really trying to say is that Kierkegaard wrote a ton, and some of it sounds very similar to what is being suggested by Foucault. Also, Kierkegaard may be a great place for us to turn to find help in understanding Foucault.

So, while these texts aren't meant to be merely a recounting of the events of the self, they are meant to be a catalogue of sayings encountered by the self in an effort to reform the self in some way.

This accords nicely with Paul Ricoeur's and David Carr's thoughts on narrative and the role it plays in shaping the self. Briefly, they assert you are the story you are telling yourself about yourself.

napalm

This is what I was after earlier in the essay when questioning the ancients about what is "persuasive" and what is not.

shots fired

was short

What's the harm in conceding this? Can't we agree here, saying "sure, buddy, rhetoric is an unreliable tool, but what else are you going to handle knowledge with? It very well may be unreliable, but it's the only tool we have."

There's only so much room in an Intro, but I really wish our editors would have included Augustine's quote from Christian Doctrine:

"Remember the Egyptians not only offered idols and terrible oppression, which the Israelite people hated and fled, but they owned vessels and ornament of gold and silver, and fine clothing besides, which the Israelites took for themselves in secret as they left Egypt, claiming it all for a better use."(2.40.60)

I can't tell how to read Dr. River's annotation. I don't see any sincerity quotes. . .

This, and the bit about metaphor, takes me straight to a speech by Robert Frost. While there is much we could find to disagree with there, check these two quotes out:

"Education by poetry is education by metaphor."

"Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections—whether from diffidence or some other instinct."

Here's a link to the speech: Told ya

Could we today add in "biology" and/or "chemistry" or even "physics" for psychology?

"from the stronger"

Ex. "Well since we all obviously agree on A, by necessity we agree on B, this other lesser claim here."

"Invention" has a neat etymology that can be helpful, I think, for understanding what the ancients meant when they talked about it. Invent is just in ("at", "toward," or, here "upon") slapped onto venio ("arrive" or "come").

What I'm after here is that the word was often used like "so I was walking in the woods the other day, and--can you believe it?--I invented a snake!" Think "discovery" instead of "creation."

It'd be hard to do now, but I'd like to put pressure on this point with ancient rhetoricians. Where is the line for them between "Ahh, you are trying to persuade me." and "Nah, we're just talking. No persuasion here."

Plus there's that whole bit about intent of the speaker and whether or not the speaker is aware of their own intentions.

By and large, light has not been a particle, but a wave.

This was Muckelbauer's move at the end of his essay.

So this word means "the act of giving birth."

"Why pick 1 or 2?" he asks. This seems to be at the heart of the reorientation Muckelbauer is suggesting. Rather than selecting a precise answer, pile that precise answer on top of all the others. To put it crudely, we ought to define rhetoric with a shovel rather than a scalpel.

I'm surprised by the use of "problem" here. That said, our author's charge to hesitate in an effort to, rather than answer, reorient the debate seems particularly helpful and, well, rhetorical.