Rhetoric, Composition, and "the Social"

Ka-Knowledge, Deixis and Bird

2007-04-18T12:45:00.000-06:00

Hey, sorry I missed everyone on Monday.

As I read Jeff Rice’s article and Collin Brooke’s discussion of deixis, I kept circling back to Charlie Parker (I could say to “jazz” or even “Bebop,” but to keep this example under some control, I’ll stick with Parker). I thought of the fusion of quotations that became the "assemblages" of Bird’s solos, especially when Rice was making a case for hip-hop’s “sounding out” as rhapsodizing, which Ong “places at the center of Homeric poetry and the Greek rhetorical tradition” (Rice). While I see that "hip-hop as an assemblage" affords us a means of discussing "different ways of knowing through digital writing," it seems like the fusion (or rhapsodizing) in hip-hop lyrics is often less interesting than the fusion of sounds sampled. I’m guilty of generalizing here, but it seems like a wider variety of cultures are assembled at the turn-table than at the mic. That said, I’ve already seen textbooks and readers that present Tupac lyrics alongside other “gritty, urban social commentaries” like Marge Piercy’s “Rape Poem”. Now, of course, it’s not Tupac’s or Jeff Rice’s fault that the full aurality of hip-hop gets canonized as--or flattened into--mere lyrics, and it doesn’t mean that hip-hop can’t help us imagine or illustrate Havelock’s (1986) aural/oral writer building “his own semi-connected discourse out of disconnected bits and pieces contained in oral discourse” (as quoted in Rice). I just think that Parker’s “recompositional” decisions in the moment of improvisation--improvising against the inherited charts and time signatures of old standards, “reimprovising” in set pieces performed nightly with “variations in the stitching [that] led to variations in rhetorical output”-- may provide a useful analog to Rice’s example of the Homeric poet. I guess I just have an easier time thinking of the “aural practice of rhapsodizing” when I think of the sampled beats, hooks, grooves, etc. without the accompanying visual rhetoric of lyrics on a lyrics sheet or in a “social commentary” section of a Bedford collection of “Minority Voices.”

Parker’s improvisations (like the solos of those he influenced) also offer an opportunity to discuss deictic systems. In one sense, Parker became a resource as a pioneering "expert": he absorbed not only the history of jazz but the history of western music and was willing to quote Bartok, Stravinsky, etc. in his playing, in a way that purportedly schooled younger musicians. In another sense he was an "intelligent agent" (the younger musicians took what they wanted or could hear from Parker’s solos, from the way he mixed and matched and seemed to create the new from classical and pop cultural sources, something that also gave expression to his ethos and pathos). For all of its solos, jazz is deeply reliant on collaboration and communication, a reliance that allowed James Baldwin a device for making his narrator finally listen to his brother Sonny "sounding out" and entering a conversation in the epiphanic close of “Sonny’s Blues”. Again, I’m only offering Charlie Parker as a metaphor for discussing deictic systems, “sounding out,” or as an alternative to expert mastery of a subject; I’m not arguing, as it seems Rice is with hip-hop, that a sustained analysis of Parker’s abilities will provide insight into digital networks or ka-knowledge.

I'm also considering Parker's impact on a “small network” of jazz buffs who had tired—at least in Harlem and a few progressive clubs on the west coast—of the influence of swing. Parker’s agency in the evolution of “bebop” is tricky to explore for the same reason it's ideal for discussing small networks: many of his innovations came during the recording strike in the early 1940s, so there was a delay between limited audiences learning to hear jazz a new way in a few clubs on either coast and the mass audiences who purchased a later “now” on recordings that tried to capture—-a few years after the fact-—the spontaneity of the “now” of small club improvisations that had already spawned legions of imitators. As early as 1939 Parker’s devotees “learned” to listen for the origo of a song like “Cherokee” even as they heard it in the “now” context of Parker re-assembling “Cherokee” into his signature tune “KoKo”. Parker’s innovation, or his “recompositional” decisions, led him to play past the original time signatures, improvise new melody lines against older songs’ chord changes, and later snag copyrights for these new songs that became, with each performance, less recognizable. That is, “Cherokee” is certainly harder to hear in “KoKo” than The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” is in Diddy’s tribute to his pal Biggie. By the time much of the country-between-the-coasts got to hear the “revolution” that was “KoKo,” the “now” of that 1944 recording had multiple layers of context: how the old standard once sounded—or at least how its underlying structure was preserved—a collage of what Parker added in the moments of, say, specific club dates in 1941, 42, 43, etc., and what Parker’s “comments” on his own solos were on the day of the studio recording (does this make bebop an example of both the deictic and palimpsestic?).

Ultimately, Rice wants to find ka-knowledge “in the mix,” or as he describes it:
“The result of this stitching (described aptly in McLuhanist terms of bodily extension) is a new type of knowledge where the personal and the multiple events/ideas/moments engaged by the personal (i.e., voice) come together. Not quite autobiography, not quite technological reflection, not quite cultural critique, not quite argument, it is somehow a bit of all the above and something else. . . .this combination of actions through rhapsodizing is indicative of the ka-knowledge of digital writing I am uncovering. In digital culture, the process of interweaving composition and identity, of becoming an extension of one's own writing, of assembling various genres of discourse, has come to be known not as the stitch, but the mix.”

Somewhat relatedly, jazz critics often struggle to find a rhetoric that doesn’t just add to a hagiography of the individual autonomous icon nor discredit the icon's "pioneering work" in favor of LaTour-be-damned “social forces” that contributed to post-World-War-II revolutions in jazz. Take the following quote by Stanley Crouch, writing about Parker in a 1989 article. After referring to Parker as “the self-made creator of a vital and breathtakingly structured jazz vernacular,” Crouch observes,

“[Parker’s] prodigious facility was used not only for exhibition or revenge, moreover, but primarily for the expression of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic inventions, at velocities that extended the intimidating relationship of thought and action that forms the mastery of improvisation in jazz.” (“Bird Land” 255)
Crouch goes on to make points about the way we begin to learn and intuit an emotional understanding of the performer (sounding out, in his own way) as he makes sampled lines and conjured riffs from the past his own—in the moment, in the “now” that doesn’t get to come back in just the same context at future gigs, recording dates, or when Parker’s solos were “digitally lifted” from their “original context” (Crouch’s terms) so that modern performers could “swing” with him on the poorly received soundtrack to Clint Eastwood’s biopic Bird (1988).

In a transcript of an interview Parker gave in the last year of his life (he died at 34), Paul Desmond and John Fitch seemed to be pressuring him into defining a way of knowing and communicating that music provided (Parker’s elliptical answers, with his false starts and halting phrasing sounds like Sonny when he is pressed to describe his anger with words instead of music in Baldwin’s long middle dialogue). Thirty-five years before the Beasties start droppin’ science in favor of ka-knowledge, Parker tries putting something similar (to me) in his own words:

“There’s definitely—there’s stories and stories and stories and stories that can be told in the musical idiom, you know? You wouldn’t say idiom, either, it’s—it’s so hard to describe music other than the basic way to describe it: music is basically melody, harmony, and rhythm. But I mean, people can do much more with music than that—it can be very descriptive in all kinds of ways, you know? [It can include] All walks of life.”

Back to deixis, I realize I’ve left out the context for this quote: interviewers were pushing him to promote “book study” of jazz to kids who think you’re either born with knowledge and “mastery” or not. All of which leads me back to Rice’s concluding explanations of Ka-Knowledge, in which he asserts:

“To enact a theory and pedagogy of the aural (i.e., sounding out), we also are inventing new forms of knowledge acquisition, forms traditional studies of literacy cannot accommodate. Ka-knowledge as digital knowledge is a mixing, a usage of a variety of ideas, events, moments, and texts for the mix and the subsequent identity of “being mixed,” not for the demonstration of expertise (a fixed, topos-bound concept)”

It seems that most jazz critics and casual fans of Parker often cite his solos--or sample them--for the “demonstration of expertise” (“hey, listen to how Bird mastered the e-flat alto sax like no one else!”), while some, like Gary Woideck, are more interested in the way Parker’s solos, his sense of what was possible musically or aurally, led him to defy traditional musical composition, the limits of structure. I guess in the context of our recent readings, I’m interested in how those like Parker retrained listeners to appreciate, decode, reconsider a high speed “variety of ideas, events, moments, and texts for the mix” (Rice). Again, I would favor including aural knowledge that doesn’t include lyrics—or an easily separated “text” for inclusion in textbooks—to illustrate many of the same points Rice seems to be getting at in his argument for ka-knowledge.

Or, whew, that could just be the cough syrup talking.

map.

2007-04-16T20:18:00.000-06:00

For Mark

2007-04-16T20:17:00.000-06:00

From The Village Voice, with love: "Hot Hot Heat"

Post on Rebekah Nathan from 8010

2007-04-16T17:51:00.000-06:00

Here it is, kids.

And here is a link to amazon's page for My Freshman Year which, like all amazon page's I link to, has the "Search Inside!" (or, alternately, the "Look Inside!" feature).

Krause and Brooke

2007-04-16T15:58:00.000-06:00

I assume that Krause's "Blogging Gone Bad" was the Brooke response that we were supposed to read (I wasn't entirely sure from the syllabus). Anyway, I was struck by Krause's remarks. He places some of the blame for his class's failed blog experiment himself, but he also points out some key issues that I found myself agreeing with, such as:

"While blogging, students quickly learn that posted content can be read by those other than the teacher and their classmates. Blogging opens up assignments beyond the teacher-student relationship, allowing the world to grade students and provide encouragement or feedback on their writings."

I wonder if Krause's utopian vision here is common. As I wrote in a comment to Faith about her blogging anxiety, there's very little to feel anxious about, since so few people will read your blog. In fact, many bloggers receive hits from friends and family. I ran a blog for two years and was disappointed that my blog didn't receive more hits. This notion that the class Web log will connect students to people around the globe is something of a pipe dream.

Later, Krause writes,

"Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I thought the blogs turned out poorly. Some students posted repeatedly, while other students barely posted at all. The amount of text per posting varied considerably. While there were times in which some students wrote longer messages, more often than not, the posts were short, merely links to other documents, or text that was "cut and pasted" from another source. There was very little writing that could be described as reflective, dynamic, collaborative, or interactive."

At times this term, I've felt that the 8040 blog could fit the description above, and I'm definitely part of the problem! I've blogged. I consistently blogged for two years. I am no technophobe, yet I find myself posting less often to the blog than I have for other forums, such as E-mail listserv or Blackboard. Part of me wonders if the blog is really more special than Blackboard discussion, which offers similar basic tools: posting and commenting. If the blog isn't really reaching out to the masses, is it really better than other simpler forms of technology?

Krause would disagree with some of my comments. He sees blogs as more polished, more formal than E-mail; thus, they can inhibit discussion, since posters might feel intimidated to post to the "author." I'm not sure I agree. Members of the class feel comfortable enough to talk to one another. I think Krause is referring here to true dynamic discourse (i.e. people from "out there" jumping in on the discussion), and as I've written above, I'm not sure how many people outside the class really find their way to the blog, become interested in what's written, and respond.

The Brooke page was okay, but did anyone else have problems putting everything together? The page begins with an overview of deixis, which sounded interesting, but by the time I finished all the readings, I didn't really sure how digital writing should embrace/acknowledge deixis. Also, as Brooke admits, his page is quite stable and doesn't seem like a very good example of a "web log as a deicitic system" (which is the name of the blog). I did like the part where Brooke writes, "In a matter of three degrees (each connection between two people is a degree), the graduate students at Syracuse, for instance, are connected to the faculty and graduate students at Purdue University, the University of Texas, Penn State University, and so on." This reminded me of a mental game that I play, and that I'm sure others play, where you try to link any given two figures (Liberace and George W. Bush, for example) in as few steps as possible. :-)

Rice

2007-04-16T09:14:00.000-06:00

At the end of Rice’s article he quotes Berlin, “Only through language do we know and act upon the conditions of our experience” (277). So, what I understand of the article is that there are those who are actively participating in understanding through rap. This makes sense.

Whenever I need to understand a concept I have to talk about it with someone more knowledgeable than myself, which means just about anybody. But that is for understanding things that are really complex from my view. I’m not sure I think that I believe that auditory information will be what leads us in the future. Rice quotes the rapper B.I.G. as seeming to state that his success came from a place other than educational mastery. If I’m not mistaken so did Kenneth Burke’s. He was not happy with educational systems, and never really finished a degree in the traditional manner. I think I remember Dr. Comas telling us that he had several sporadic attempts, but didn’t finish. Anyway, my point is that our successes in general probably do not come from the educational system. It is through finding our own voices more likely. We read, attend classes, etc., in order to attempt to broaden our views and to conform with certain educational criteria so that we can more easily succeed in this world.

Power, juice, etc., come from inside and are sparked by things from the outside. I think.

Blogs

2007-04-16T08:58:00.000-06:00

My interest in blogging has only, so far, been related to what is required in certain classes. Although, I think a couple of things in this weeks readings have sparked a different kind of interest.

A quote at the author uses by Kathleen Blake Yancey got my attention: “The word Now when I wrote this text is one time; as I read the Now in San Antonio was a second time; and now, when this talk is published in CCC and who [knew?] how many people do (or do not!) read this Chair’s Address, it will be many, many other times (318)” (1). So, whether or not we add words, take away ideas and sculpt them to meet our needs, or simply read the ideas to interested parties, the premise changes. Now will never be the same for readers who are not reading the words simultaneously. The “situation” of now will be different for each of those readers—their mood, their circumstance, the reason for the reading of the words, etc. It is as if time itself is an element that thrives within the written word. I find that interesting, and perhaps, will explore that at some later date.

While reading “Software, socially” I began thinking of another aspect of the effects of blogging. Blogging as an electronic transference of information, like all electronic transfers, I suppose, is instantaneous. It is also limitless as far as the information it can contain. This brings me to wonder if we can be overly informed. Information, knowledge, for me has to be taken in, and thought over for a time, so that I might integrate it more thoroughly with prior knowledge. This makes attempting grad school at warp speed fun. Ugh. But I wonder if all this knowledge pouring forth changing, mutating, gaining, losing, etc., is losing something. The translation of that information must be quick and adept. Is it actually possible to keep up?

Centripetal/Centrifugal reminded me, of course, of Latour. It also made me think of my idea about concentric circles, and how that is now not quite right. Perhaps a better analogy is chemistry. Each new reader being a new ingredient that can change ideas and thoughts radically or barely. I realize this was about software, but. . . The author states, “This fluidity returns us to Yancey’s evocation of deixis—in the context of research, a given source may function centripetally or centrifugally for us depending on the time and place within the research process where we use it.”

Hmmm.

More On Rice

2007-04-16T07:33:00.000-06:00

I've really appreciated reading the posts about Rice's uses of hiphop to redefine literacy, and they've helped me to think about what his article is and isn't doing. In my reading of it, he's making comparisons between traditional conceptions of rhetoric and a rhetoric embodied by hiphop, and doing so to show that traditional rhetoric needs to change in order to respond to changes in culture fomented by new technology.

The article may make it seem like he's trying to claim academic cred for the Notorious BIG and the Wu-Tang Clan, and/or to give street cred to his academic piece (which has been a hot rhetorical move, maybe, ever since Barthes mythologized pop culture); what I took from it is that hiphop doesn't claim any academic membership, but embodies aspects of culture that academically spawned rhetoric can't, since its focus has been drawn from the image and the print media, and not from the aural realm that McLuhan and Ong defined as the rhetorical territory created by new technology. In his view, traditional rhetoric hasn't ventured into that territory; hiphop, more than any other form of music, has.

I believe that his article outlines at least three ways in which hiphop rhetoricizes aural media. First, hiphop's use of sampling foregrounds the text as assemblage. Second, its reliance on mixing different sounds together, more than other forms of music, foregrounds those sounds as representing different contexts--instead of a guitar and drums, we might get a guitar loop from an Aerosmith song and a bass/snare track from another hiphop song, so each song becomes a mixing of cultures that embodies the simultaneity of aural culture delineated by McLuhan. Finally, the stance assumed by the Notorious BIG, the Wu-Tang Clan, and the Beasties, establishes the primacy of the individual voice--not as a mood, the way Lunsford defines it, but, literally, as the sound of a voice. Using that voice, the rapper doesn't belong to the traditional rhetorical establishment, but to the rhetorical alterity of hiphop, with its own science, its own ka-knowledge, and its own cred, based on the power of the individual voice to carry the rhetoric. As Aaron wonderfully pointed out, other forms of music do all of the above (the boast claimed by Rice as an aspect of ka-knowledge comes, I think, from the blues). However, hiphop combines them with greater frequency.

The article's juxtapositions can lead to the idea that Rice is trying to install hiphop in the academy, and/or that rappers are trying to claim a particular rhetorical territory; I got this funny vision of Ad Rock rushing to his fellow Beasties with a copy of McLuhan's article, saying, "We need to rhetoricize the auditory domain!," and Mike D gleefully shouting, "Fellows, let's drop some science to drive McLuhan's thesis home!" What I think Rice is trying to say is that hiphop is rhetoricizing aural technology in a way that traditional rhetoric is not, and that examining the particulars of that rhetoric will help us to shape a pedagogy more informed by that rhetoric.

Deixis

2007-04-16T00:01:00.000-06:00

My reaction to the Brooke article was similar to Aaron's in that I questioned the explanation of deixis itself, although my "objection" to it, if it can be called an objection, was on narrower grounds: I felt that the temporal--and to a lesser degree the spatial--was being foregrounded, when in fact one could pay just as much attention to the agency and power relations created and maintained through deixis.

In linguistics, following Buhler, we speak of deixis as a process whereby utterances rely on context to give them meaning--it's the way in which the reference of certain elements in an utterance is determined in relation to not just a particular time or place, but also to a specific speaker and addressee. The origo is the context from which the reference is made—it is the viewpoint expressed by one interlocutor that must be understood by another interlocutor in order for the latter to interpret the utterance. In most deictic systems, the origo identifies with the current speaker (for example, the “I” in a first-person statement).

What interests me in terms of the Brooke piece is how the discussion of deixis with regard to networks constituted by centrifugal and centripetal movement and flux (in what I thought was similar to Latour's argument that the social is constantly being reassembled) is what role power might play--or, alternately, might be resisted--in such systems. The discussion of deixis immediately reminded me of a part of what eventually became one of the writing samples for my application to the MA program here: I used the concept of deixis to discuss how it can inform the transition from modernism to postmodernism. The relationship between the Occident and the Orient before World War II, for example, can arguably be situated in terms of deixis, where the origo, then, is analogous to the centre, to the Occident. As Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and others have mapped for us, the Occident spoke to the Orient, it lectured it, narrated it, implicated it in its subjugation. Place deixis is implicit in this analogy as well. Place deixis marks the spatial location relative to the location of the speaker: “over there” implies a distance away from the speaker. Before World War II, the Orient was “over there” from the Occident.

Following the war, however, these deictic relationships came into crisis. The origo was no longer located solely in the Occident. Previously oppressed voices were now heard and emerged from multiple points in space simultaneously, breaking down the deictic binary. Similarly, “over there” was no longer a one-to-one opposition either: place was complicated as the Orient broke down into separate independent nations and cultures in the post-colonial period, while simultaneously globalization disturbed their lines of demarcation. East and West had been replaced by a multititude of locations. The dichotomies of us and them, of black and white, of masculine and feminine were no longer tenable. Both the end of empire and the move toward globalization problematized the relations of the East and West as they existed up through the modern period. The centre indeed could no longer hold. (The emerging voices that arose out this deictic crisis brought forth a second problem: power relations had been disturbed and there was now a crisis of authority or, as I call it, the crisis of interpellation--but this is for another time).

Those other readings...

2007-04-15T22:46:00.000-06:00

So it appears that Rice is getting the lion's share of posts, which leaves Brooke and Krause (and my map) outside in the cold. There's not alot for me to say in that area, either, since I too find Rice's issues more easily assayable.

Here's what my minimal thinking (after a long weekend of thesis-ing) has come up with. Brooke says that Yancey claims we should focus on the deitic way that tech can help us as compists/rhetists.

He defines blogs as deitic systems, claiming that "... even when the moment has passed, the terms are capable of referencing that moment" in order to show us that blogs have this ability to conceptualize "now" in different ways.

I'm thinking that in the same way, though, they're automatically "then". While there seems to be some claim that these times are indeed timeless, and always in the present, it appears to me to be, unless you're the AUTHOR, always in the past. While I always buy "social" for social's sake, this doesn't appear to be social to me, at least in the ways that he says it is. I'm not sure I'm being clear...Brooke talks about how Yancey's writing occurs in three different "nows" in the article--and he connects them to himself as the reader/imaginer in his current "now". But come on, HER "now" is THEN, no matter how we try and social it up.

I dont' think there's anything inherently wrong about seeing it as "then", since "then" isn't so bad--plenty of "thens" can influence us "now", but it doesn't, to my mind, make them "nows".

Again, I'm all for "Aaron you've missed the point" sort of responses here. I've been writing for pretty much 48 hours, and I'm pretty brain fried, but in the mean time, I've also read Rice and Brooke, and they seem to be, particularly from the scattering of posts, "blowing things out of proportion"...

Like the other folks, I'm all for treating things outside the comp classroom as academic, but some of the bits this week seem really forced....

On Rice

2007-04-15T22:39:00.000-06:00

Right before Jeff Rice visited the campus, Matt Gordon gave me a copy of “The Making of Ka-Knowledge” and said something like, “Here. You’re into this theory stuff—you understand it better than I do. Read this and tell me if it makes any sense.” The first part of what he said was an assertion that was equal parts compliment and insult in a way that only Dr. Gordon can deliver. The second part proved to be a challenge.

I read “The Making of Ka-Knowledge” then—something like three months ago now, so I’ve had that long to marinate on it and I have to say that I feel conflicted, at best, about it. Dr. Rice starts off by valorizing a non-traditional form of rhetoric and he makes a move to incorporate what's outside of the academy into the classroom (like Faith, I see this as a good thing). He then theoretically describes--in a wedding of McLuhan/Ong and Lyotard--how listening is bound up with engaging “the process of knowing as opposed to just the known… redefined through technological innovation” (267), which he exemplifies using the lyrics to various hip-hop/rap songs. Dr. Rice and I should be fellow travelers, then, but I found myself taking exception to a lot of what he had to say. (We probably are fellow travelers, but for the sake of this post I’m going to commit a trahison des clercs or, alternately, just play devil’s advocate).

Like David, I found myself resisting the beginning of the piece and then warming up to it in the second half (my resistance was aided by the fact that when I went to my copy of the 1964 edition of The Gutenberg Galaxy, the passages that Dr. Rice quotes weren't on the pages he cites, and that the quote he gives for McLuhan later on page 268 that doesn't reference a title but only a year--1967--has no corresponding entry for that year in the References section). I think David is right on when he says that

Rice's early discussion of Biggie and Wu-Tang feels awfully forced, and neither of these examples really show off what Rice ultimately finds most rewarding about aural writing in a digital world. Rather, the references feel like a desperate stab at street cred. The first pages of the Rice article feel a bit arbitrary at best, obvious at worst.

David goes on to make some great points, and I'll just add some of my own observations here.

First, for me there’s a problem of definition. Dr. Rice asserts that “droppin’ science” is hip-hop’s renaming of McLuhan’s “new physics." As Dr. Rice puts it (268):

Droppin’ science means to rhyme (usually in a unique way) in order to rhetorically engage with the aural dimensions of discourse. Rhyming, like McLuhan’s new physics, is meant to evoke new types of discursive relationships, to generate new kinds of knowing processes. Droppin’ science’s nonliterate status (as McLuhan might say) might be attributed to the ways it disrupts the conventions of print culture (linearity, syllogistic reasoning) in favor of rhyming. Droppin’ science is meant to lead to a new “wisdom” often rhetorically shaped as a physics or general science practice.

This isn't exactly the "droppin' science" that I know. At the risk of sounding like I'm trying to assert my own authenticity or street cred, rap and hip-hop are two genres that I listened to growing up. I have every album that Dr. Rice cites and I'm familiar with the lyrics he quotes, and my personal feeling is that he's overstating what "droppin' science" means. It can mean a few different things, actually, depending on who's doing the talking and when (in other words, deixis--but that's another post), but it basically means something very much like "to school" (another hip-hop phrase), that is, to demonstrate either skill or wisdom for the sake (or at the expense) of someone else. You can "school" someone by upstaging them in a battle or, alternately, you can "school" or "drop science" in the sense of disseminating knowledge to those listening to you. The expression goes all the way back to documented usage among members of the Five Percenter branch of the Nation of Islam in describing the uses of science (Rakim, whom Dr. Rice citess in his definition of "droppin' science," was actually one-half of the duo Erik B. and Rakim, and they were/are both Five Percenters). And the OED entry actually explains the term's use well: to "drop science" (you don't need the hip "-in' ending) is "to impart knowledge or wisdom, frequently about social issues" (from the OED's entry for draft additions for 2005, entry "b"). The OED offers this citation: "Recorded in 1989 on the television programme CBS This Morning in J. E. Lighter's Hist. Dict. Amer. Slang (1994) I. 660/2: 'Droppin' science is when she's really explainin' what's goin' on." In other words, "telling it like it is" or, one might posit, cutting through the b.s.

So it's ironic, in a way, that Dr. Rice's article "directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge" (to quote bell hooks, speaking about what I'd say is a related matter in "Postmodern Blackness"). Or as Faith puts it, "if Biggie's argument is a rejection of traditional schooling, how would he feel about his lyrics being co-opted for an article in an academic journal?" It seems like Dr. Rice took the Urban Dictionary's entry and ran with it (seriously, he seems to quote it almost verbatim), adding to the entry's description of it meaning "to rhyme, say or do something original or unique, especially when rapping or in music," the puzzling assertion that it also means "to generate new kinds of knowing processes." Really?

The point is that Dr. Rice should've dropped the "droppin' science" bit, and especially the Beasties' use of both that phrase and even more so "ka-knowledge," which means nothing, period, but especially not what Dr. Rice develops for it (for a thorough discussion of the Beasties' use of the terms, see Dan LeRoy's treatment of Paul's Boutique in the 33 1/3 series--search for "sound of science" on amazon's page and read LeRoy's discussion, starting on page 85). The whole enterprise is a red herring that got the best of him. Furthermore, I think Dr. Rice would have done himself a great service if he would have actually dug deeper into the history of hip-hip and rap. For example, bringing in Public Enemy's "Caught! Can I Get a Witness?" from their seminal It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back (1988), which is about PE going on trial for "stealing beats" (the title of the song itself is an homage to Marvin Gaye's "Can I Get a Witness?"). Chuck D starts the track thusly:

Caught, now in court cause I stole a beat
This is a sampling sport
But I'm giving it a new name
What you hear is mine
P.E., you know the time

Soon afterwards, Flavor Flav (I know--cringe) interjects into Chuck's flow to tell the court that "Man, y'all can't copyright no beats, man!" At the time, sampling was becoming a matter for copyright infringement cases. PE was encouraging the free exchange of ideas and bricolage composition that Dr. Rice sees in emerging digital forms, but they also are pointing out something that Dr. Rice seems to miss altogether in his analysis: if he had went further back still, he could have brought in Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Kaz (and Grandmaster Flash), Kool Herc and other DJs' use of sampling and mixing that would speak directly to his use of McLuhan/Ong and Lyotard much more than any of the latter, hipper albeit less relevant artists he cites do. For example, in Droppin' Science: Critical Essays on Rap and Hip Hop Culture, William Eric Perkins points out that

The DJ ruled during hip hop's early days, and it was the DJ who established the foundations for the lyricist (the MC). The DJ's style was determined by the beats he was able to exploit from the continuous riffs, solos, traps, and thousands of other snippets of sound in the audio treasure chests at his disposal. It was sound that molded the first wave of hip hop (page 6).

Like Mark says about his own post, I might seem "grumpy"--or even captious--here. It probably seems absurd to critique Dr. Rice's gloss of "droppin' science," but I think it speaks to what Faith means when she says that "the juxtaposition of rap lyrics and academic discourse sometimes had a comic effect." I agree, but I'd qualify that by saying it's a matter of execution, not of any essential incommensurability of the two--and I see that comic effect beginning with Dr. Rice's gloss of what needn't have been a violent yoking together of heterogeneous ideas. The definition of "droppin' science" also happens to be where I'd locate the move Dr. Rice makes from the theoretical discussion of McLuhan/Ong and Lyotard to hip-hop itself, the move David and Aaron (and I) found problematic. I think the reason why it's problematic is because--like David and Faith have both pointed out--the academic-speak does a disservice to what is actually an interesting argument, once the layers of unnecessary obfuscation are removed.

A Bitter Response

2007-04-15T21:08:00.000-06:00

I agree with Faith that the intellectualizing of hip-hop makes for unintentionally funny reading. In particular, Rice's early discussion of Biggie and Wu-Tang feels awfully forced, and neither of these examples really show off what Rice ultimately finds most rewarding about aural writing in a digital world. Rather, the references feel like a desperate stab at street cred. The first pages of the Rice article feel a bit arbitrary at best, obvious at worst. For instance, I'm still not entirely sure how Rice moves from McLuhan to hip-hop. Oh, I generally see how he moves from one to another, but I don't specifically see how he does so, except that he sees a special connection to hip-hop, and that's all that matters. I also didn't really follow how Elbow's comments about "Juice" led Rice to awkwardly transition into, "In hip-hop, 'Juicy' is a song by the late Notorious B.I.G." While we're talking about Biggie, Rice's discussion of Biggie states the obvious, with the obvious simply translated into academic-ese: "Graff's 'literacy myth' might be understood, in this context, as the myth of knowledge mastery. 'My success,' B.IG. seems to say, 'came from somewhere else than education mastery.' There is an additional dimension to B.I.G.'s rejection, however. Within the rejection of conventional literacy [. . .] and its 'in your face' style is the simultaneous preference for another kind of literacy, an aural literacy of sounding out" (270).

Simple translation into regular-speak: Biggie, like most hip-hop artists--heck, like most rock artists--proves that people can have smarts that don't have their roots in the classroom.

Duh.

I don't mean to sound bitter. I just have lots of problems with academic writing that dresses up what it has to say. I remember reading this psychoanalytic reading of Faulkner where the author spent twenty pages invoking Lacan just to say that women in Faulkner's fiction have agency. Hell, I knew that before I even read the article!

The good news is that Rice's article is much better in the second half, when he spends less time establishing street cred and spends more time drawing analogies between the pastiche, bricolage style of hip-hop and the direction he sees digital writing headed. Rice is right. Hip-hop folds in a lot: spits, samples, loops, rhythms. All of these hit the listener at once and are "read" (or downloaded, in LaTourian language) instantaneously. In fact, I thought of LaTour when reading the second half of the Rice article. Just as the social only becomes evident in a glimpse seen when mediated elements are assembled, the assemblage of hip-hop works similarly. Any given hip-hop song has the potential to produce its meaning on the fly, as it hits the listener's ear; the listener cannot possibly "process" all the elements, but that's not what's important; the overall assemblage produces its effect. Thus, I could kind of see where Rice was going with his desire for future writing.

Too bad most of the article still sounded unintentionally silly.

I Hope This Doesn't Come Off As Grumpy

2007-04-15T16:34:00.000-06:00

I was excited to read this week’s readings, hoping that I could learn about how blogging will fundamentally change the way human beings think and interact with each other. At the very least, I was hoping to read that blogging as seriously disrupted some of our taken-for-granted cultural institutions. So far, I’m not really convinced that blogs are all that special. I concede that they have numerous uses for teachers, students, and non-academics alike, but I feel like we might need to temper our excitement about the potential of blogging.

I don’t mind Marshall McLuhan, at least not when he says that the medium is the message. I understand the importance of the kind of thing that Meg Hourihan has done in describing what she believes is unique about a blog and how that might influence the way we think and interact with one another. Still, I tend to agree with John Grohol on this one. I’m just not convinced that blogging does a whole lot that other online formats haven’t already done. Their ease-of-use and their conversational quality might make them a bit more accessible than other web-based forms of community, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s really tough to make any generalizations about blogs. Some blogs are giving readers daily access to the opinions of respected experts in particular fields, others obscure the idea of an “expert” to such a degree that false information can be propogated by just about anyone; some blogs foster community, others just serve as soap-boxes for bloated personalities that don’t have the faces for television.

In addition to my reservations about the difference between blogs and other online forms, its also important to take into account the number of people who don’t use blogs or for that matter don’t use computers (despite the moves that Year of the Blog makes in describing the growing appeal of blogs). While I’ll admit that weblogs are useful (they’ve certainly been a helpful, important part of this course), entertaining (here’s my favorite), and informative, I’m going to side with Grohol on this one: “Everything old is new again” and we need to understand that blogging has no “special quality to it that makes it, and the people who engage in it, somehow unique or special.”

Blogging Angst

2007-04-15T08:28:00.000-06:00

I was interested in Krause's discussion of “audience.” More than once, I've considered starting a blog, but I always get too scared off by audience awareness. I'd like to use a blog as a working-through of ideas that might eventually end up as something more formal, but I worry too much about who will read what I write and what they will think about me. I feel that I would have to qualify everything with a “Just thinking out loud here, but ....” Krause writes that his students as well as his colleagues lacked motivation or a “personal reason” to write in the blog in the first place. Most of my motivation to write is when I'm getting angry about things or people or ideas, and a public space is not an appropriate place for that. (Perhaps this is why so many bloggers write about their dogs.) My network includes too many people that I have to worry about impressing (and not just scholars, Boyfriend's Parents are online too). Now that I re-read that last sentence, “deixis” seems precisely the problem: I get so wrapped up in thinking about all the different meanings my words will have for different people that I become completely blocked.

This is Why I'm Hot

2007-04-14T13:58:00.000-06:00

I understand and appreciate the way Jeff Rice describes a pedagogy that focuses on ka-knowledge and explicates “a different method of forming ideas and presenting ideas” (p. 277). Still, something Rice wrote when he was describing “the mix” got me thinking of other ways that hip-hop is related to the social. Upon arguing that the point of the mix is to juxtapose styles and open up new discourses, Rice claims “what is often forgotten in discussions of hip-hop is the rhetorical gesture of showing off, a move essential for enacting the mix in the first place. This showing off is not a gesture to demonstrate expertise nor is it egotistical” (p. 274).

Rice might be talking about the art of sampling and borrowing from other genres of music, but there are clearly other elements of hip-hop that could indeed be considered egotistical. Hip-hop is typically a male-dominated space, and so masculinity is a distinct characteristic of this type of music. According to Trujillo (1991) occupational achievement is a key component of hegemonic masculinity. This can be seen in the efforts of many rappers to explain why they are the best in their chosen business. According to Billboard.com, the number one Rap Track in the country is called “This is Why I’m Hot” by Mims. The song’s title basically explains it all – lyrically, Mims provides a plethora of reasons for why he is hot and you are not. Personally, I was most convinced when he tells me “I’m hot ‘cause I’m fly.” Anyway, I’d give other examples of the tendency of rappers to get a bit braggadocios, but I think it’s something with which most people are familiar.

But let’s say that this self-promotional quality of hip-hop stems from the tradition of battle-rap. Surely, this is a good example of invention as a social act. Sure, each party is trying to one-up their competitor, but they are certainly feeding off of one another and directly referencing each other’s prior utterances. The result, in many cases, is likely much more interesting than the work of just one person rhyming by themselves. In short, reality is being constructed through the efforts of a collective.

Rice quotes from a variety of hip-hop artists, some of which are part of groups, and others who perform as individuals. Clearly, the social is an important component of the work produced by collectives such as the Beastie Boys and the Wu-Tang Clan. According to Invention as a Social Act, the social must also be a necessary component of the songs created by individual artists such as Notorious B.I.G. and Mos Def. I’d be really interested in comparing the creative process, as well as the actual products of artists that operate as a collective to those who at least claim to be individuals.

In summary, Rice’s project was not necessarily to talk about the role of invention and the social in hip-hop, but clearly there are ways in which the social is responsible for hip-hop. Among the best evidence of this might be hip-hop’s origins, which rest within particular communities, and not the actions of individual actors.

Trujillo, N. (1991). Hegemonic masculinity on the mound: Media representations of Nolan Ryan and American sports culture. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 8(3), 290-309.

School Spirit

2007-04-14T13:10:00.000-06:00

My latest crusade for composition studies is that it needs to look outside of the composition classroom more, so I appreciated the creativity of Jeff Rice's piece. What fascinates me about writing, and what I think makes it so worthwhile to study is that it's everywhere (unlike, say, Chaucer). Everybody writes (including Biggie).

I was wondering why Rice didn't mention Kanye West's The College Dropout. West, whose mother is an English professor, dropped out of Columbia College in Chicago, and much of the album is his argument for the uselessness of that education, and how it hasn't correlated to his success. See, for example, the lyrics to the School Spirit Skits 1 and 2. Kanye West is probably best known for his enormous ego ("the rhetorical gesture of showing off"), which prompts him to do things like say that “George Bush doesn't care about black people” and appear on the cover of Rolling Stone as Jesus. I imagine that Rice would see this as part of his “vision” of his success. Kanye West is also an especially relevant example because he rose to fame as a producer -- it was his "assemblages" that made him famous.

Still, I'll be honest – the juxtaposition of rap lyrics and academic discourse sometimes had a comic effect. “Academic Locates Pedagogical Structure of Literacy Myth in Old Dirty Bastard Lyrics” sounds like an Onion headline. And if Biggie's argument is a rejection of traditional schooling, how would he feel about his lyrics being co-opted for an article in an academic journal?

Relevant Reading...

2007-04-14T12:05:00.000-06:00

There's an interesting article in a recent issue of Mass Communication and Society. It's called, "Is Advertising Creativity Primarily an Individual or a Social Process?" As the title implies, it is pretty relevant to this course. The authors use scientific understandings of creativity and social systems to argue that the social (although they never refer to it as such) is an undeniable factor in the creation of today's popular advertising. The article analyzes the stories about how famous campaigns such as Foster's Lager's "Australian for Beer," Budweiser's "Whassup," and Snicker's "Why Wait" were created. You can't get the article from EBSCO yet because they hold articles for a year before oh-so-generously granting us access to them, but I'll bring the hard copy to class this week in case anybody is interested.

Ka-Knowing Latour

2007-04-12T15:01:00.000-06:00

Jeff Rice's article ties the writing of Ong and McLuhan, which hints at technology transforming rhetoric, to hiphop's unique innovations, and depicts hiphop as an aurally based way of communicating that springs from technology. The ties that he makes are primarily to the above writers, along with Berlin and a few others, almost all of whom seem to align his discussion with the social nature of rhetoric; the only surprise in his citations is maybe Peter Elbow. Elbow's discussion of the "juice" that spurs writing, which seems to stem from a Platonic view of invention, is equated with the "juice" of the Notorious BIG, and both depicted as difficult to pin down. This "juice" reminds me of Latour's "plasma," which also seems to bring the ineffable into discussions of the social.

All of the above remind me of our classes focused on ANT. Donna pointed out that Rice's article ties network discussion in to hiphop, and I'm wondering now, more than ever, if some hiphop might be considered ANT documentation of community life. Rice's citing of the Wu-Tang Clan has all of them saying their names, representing a multiplicity of actors, and how many hiphop songs could be said to offer actors that are nonhuman, like brand names and place names? This other-referentiality seems more common to hiphop than to other genres of music. Certainly, other songs refer to brand names and band member names, but the sense of each band member playing a part that constitutes the band as an entity is more common than in hiphop. Too, one mainstream hiphop group tends to lead us to another, as in any network, that's ultimately borderless; Outkast has the Goodie Mob and the Dungeon Family, and so on. Does the hiphop song function as a piece of ANT documentation?

Textbook dollar breakdown.

2007-04-12T08:05:00.000-06:00

Here's the graphic I was talking about in class last time. It's from the National Association of College Stores (NACS), so it's industry-produced (that may or may not be a good thing). The first slice you see is for author income, but as it says, that includes what's used to cover expenses. I went to this presentation at the 2006 NACS conference and they broke it down further, the actual profit that authors make is closer to 5 cents per dollar.

Court

----------------

1. Author Income : 11.8 ¢
Author's royalty payment from which author pays research and writing expenses.

2. Publisher's Paper, Printing & Editorial Costs : 32.8 ¢
All manufacturing costs from editing to paper costs to disctribution, as well as storage, record keeping, billing, publisher's offices, employee's salaries and benefits.

3. Publisher's Income : 7.2 ¢
After-tax income from which the publisher pays for new product development, author advances, market research, and dividend to stockholders.

4. Publisher's General and Administrative : 10.2 ¢
Including federal, state and local taxes, excluding sales tax, paid by the publishers.

5. Publisher's Marketing Costs : 15.6 ¢
Marketing, advertising, promotion, publisher's field staff, professors' free copies.

6. Freight Expense : 1.0 ¢
The cost of getting books from the publisher's warehouse or bindery to the college store. Park of cost of goods sold paid to freight company.

7. College Store Personnel : 11.0 ¢
Store employee's salaries and benefits to handle ordering, receiving, pricing, shelving, cashiers, customer service, refund desk and sending extra textbooks back to the publisher.

8. College Store Operations : 6.3 ¢
Insurance, utilities, building and equipment rent and maintenance, accounting and data processing charges and other overhead paid by college stores.

9. College Store Income (pre-tax*) : 4.1 ¢
* Note: The amount of federal, state and/or local tax, and therefore the amount and use of any after-tax profit, is determined by the store's ownership, and usually depends on whether the college store is owned by an institution of higher education, a contract management company, a cooperative, a foundation, or by private individuals.

Please Note
The statistics in this illustration reflect the most current 2002-2003 financial data gathered by the National Association of College Stores and financial data provided by the Association of American Publishers. These numbers are averages and do not represent a particular publisher or store.

House Bill 213 passes...

2007-04-11T22:17:00.000-06:00

Bad news.

And more bad news.

2007-04-09T21:22:00.000-06:00

Holy Concatenations, Batman! I think I finally figured out how to post these:)

Three Versions of Rhetoric

2007-04-09T15:16:00.000-06:00

It's interesting to read the three articles assigned for this class, and look broadly at their views of rhetoric. In each one, rhetoric is articulated as something different, and each holds different social implications.

Bitzer's article seems to delineate rhetoric the way Plato and Gaonkar did--as something suited for persuasion, and nothing else. He takes it for granted that rhetoric is used when persuasive language is needed, which is limited to a specific set of situations.

Vatz acknowledges this as a primary difference between them, and tries to render Bitzer's position untenable by showing its roots in the Platonist tradition. Clearly rhetoric can't be situational, and must be constitutive of meaning, because rhetors seem so clearly able to create emergencies and other situations where rhetoric is heightened.

Edbauer seems to work more from Vatz's tradition, but to modify it with the same kind of horticultural metaphor offered by ANT, and its heterogeneity. Rhetoric, like the ANT conceptions of the individual and the world, exists in the confluence of too many influences for it to have tidy borders and guidelines.

Exigence seems to be the pivot point that facilitates these different definitions, and it also implies divergent definitions of rhetor and audience. All of the above hearken back to earlier readings; Vatz and Edbauer seem to both be working from a position that might be shared by Berlin, LeFevre, and Crowley, of rhetoric as ubiquitous and constructed in socially constructed selves.

Contexts and Networks

2007-04-09T12:27:00.000-06:00

Each of this week’s readings reminded me of my eighth grade journalism teacher who was fond of saying that quotes were never truly “out of context,” quotes were just being placed temporarily in a different context. “You could never,” she would repeat, “be outside of a context.” Bitzer might have said, yeah, but you have to admit there was a “natural context” (or an original one, situated somewhere, the principal’s office, perhaps, where an interview about dress code first occurred) and this natural context was comprised of “persons, events, objects and relations.” Vatz might have sided with my teacher and said, yeah, “but one never runs out of context. One never runs out of facts to describe a situation. . .the facts or events communicated to us are choices, by our sources of information. . .any rhetor is involved in this sifting and choosing” (so my jr. high principal, like Keith Richards last week, can’t really complain that his comments were taken out of context just because they reappeared in a different one) (Vatz 156). Edbauer would seem to expand beyond my teacher’s implications and say, yeah, and you’re not just putting the principal’s quotes into one new fixed context, either—you’re just a point of distribution; we’re always in myriad contexts, and we’re also within and between myriad contexts. The (1) original taped interview and (2) whatever you think you’ve made salient by quoting for your article (in the old Bitzler view) are just two nodes of the many already in existence.” This would have taken longer for my teacher to articulate, though, and I know now her contract was already set for termination, at least partly because she didn’t think we should get so hung up about the original context of quotes.

Another connection I’m still thinking through. . .

Edbauer includes Biesecker’s “problem with many takes on rhetorical situation[s],” which is essentially (or anti-essentially) imagining rhetoric for an audience of “already-formed, already-discrete individuals” already limits the possible “potencies” of what rhetoric can hope to do in a situation. As Becker clarifies, the problem with this configuration is that rhetoric may only be used to “influence an audience, to realign their allegiances, but not to form new identities” (Edbauer 2; Biesecker 111). This seemed to account for some of our lamentation over Crowley’s rhetoric. For instance, Crowley states that “fundamentalists” are “unwilling to meet” conditions in which they run the “risk” of having their “beliefs altered” by exchange in a rhetorical situation in which “everyone is accorded the respect due to participants,” whereas “a liberal’s identity” is “not necessarily threatened by a change in belief” (196). Edbauer might argue that both the liberal’s identity and the conservative / fundamentalist / apocalyptist’s identity cannot be situated or as fixed as Crowley renders them (supposedly) for the sake of finding potential stasis for a rhetorical situation between the two. It would seem that both sides are already “trans-situationally” linked in a shared ecology of buzzwords, platform stands, Darwin vs. Jesus Fish car decorations, etc. It would also seem that Crowley only succeeds in trying to fix the identities and the sites of rhetorical interaction in ways that “mask the fluidity of rhetoric” as it’s lived daily, beyond the confines of what is made salient by a few dominant news organizations and spin doctors (Edbauer, page 13ish on my print out).

Another related thought. . .

Vatz, arguing conversely with Bitzler, concludes that “rhetors choose or do not choose to make salient situations, facts, events, etc.. . .after salience is created, the situation must be translated into meaning” (160). This idea of who or what makes things salient (and is everyone who adds a distribution point, in Edbauer’s construct, a rhetor? Or even interested in Vatz and Bitzler’s conflicting notions of saliency?) also becomes interesting in the age of using your cell phone’s video function to create a TMZ.com event, and / or “ecology” of situations online. I think it’s easy for us to think of politicians (a president, his speech writers, his party’s platforms, his lobbyists, his pollsters, his machine, etc.) choosing events to turn into crises not because these events offer inherent exigence (Bitzler) but because the president et al. chose to make certain salient features into a crisis for perceived political gain (Vatz, Burke and motive, etc.). However, it’s maybe more interesting to think through Edbauer’s observations when it’s not the president but the guy who had his phone above his head in time to catch Michael Richards’ racist meltdown, Britney challenging our notions of public decorum, etc. etc.

Selling the recorded event to TMZ. Com could still be seen as a result of profit motive, but the “rhetor” here, if we’re limited to older models, is not even making commentary so much as downloading and forwarding an event—one point of distribution—that will then fan out wildly over the literal network of the internet and the figurative network of public discussion (Has he/she gone too far?), office chatter, blogs, YouTube copies of copies, parody sketches, Daily Show and late night jabs, appropriations into different political platforms, and a wildly diverse “rhetorical-event neighborhood” that seems akin to semioticians talking of “free-floating signifiers” (though, even then, many semioticians posit that there was an “original signified” from which the signifier, or recorded event, has come untethered, and this may bring us back to how structurally or poststructurally we like to think of / locate / fix an “original context”).

Genesis of Rhetorical Action

2007-04-09T08:50:00.000-06:00

Vatz’s problems the Rhetorical Situation were ethical and philosophical in nature. They were not very practical – a more practical approach realizes that without some variation on the rhetorical situation, studying discourse becomes incredibly difficult. I can’t imagine writing an analysis of a particular speech without using the term “situation” at least incidentally. But as I wrote previously, I do tend to disagree with the way the situation is purported to bring all discourse into being. I believe other factors must be considered. So does Bill Benoit, who challenged The Rhetorical Situation, and most theory about genre, with his theory of the “Genesis of Rhetorical Action.”

“Rhetorical discourse is called into existence by situation,” wrote Bitzer (p. 9). He granted even more power to the situation when he wrote, “The situation controls the rhetorical response in the same sense that the question controls the answer and the problem controls the solution. Not the rhetor and not persuasive intent, but the situation is the source and ground of rhetorical activity-and, I should add, of rhetorical criticism. (p. 6). Benoit (2000) has adopted and adapted Burke’s pentad in order to demonstrate that there are indeed factors other than the rhetorical situation that bring discourse into being.

Basically, Benoit used Burkean ratios to argue that scene, or situation, was not the only thing that could inspire an act. The purpose-act ratio, the agent-act ratio, and the agency-act ratio could also be responsible for generating a body of discourse. A rhetorical critic should approach a text by considering the influence of each other pentadic term on the act. The critic may find that the rhetor’s purpose best explains the creation of a discourse, and accounts for the specific nature of that discourse. It is also possible that this use of the pentad will only confirm that the scene is indeed the term with the most explanatory power over a particular message. Still, the value is in systematically considering each ratio before falling back on the rhetorical situation as Bitzer would have.

Admittedly, Benoit’s system, because it relies on Burke’s pentad, is guilty of the tendency in communication studies to rely on “elemental conglomerations” for describing and explaining discursive processes. Jenny Edbauer cites Louise Weatherbee Phelps as a major opponent of this sort of approach. Still, I believe the theory of the Genesis of Rhetorical Action is useful for opening up a universe of alternative explanations not only for why a piece of discourse exists, but for what that piece of discourse does, and how it does it.

Benoit, W. (2000). Beyond genre Theory: The genesis of rhetorical action. Communication
Monographs, 67(2), 178-192.

Austin City Limits

2007-04-08T23:46:00.000-06:00

One thing that I thought about last week with Latour and that has come back to mind again as I read Bitzer, Vatz, and Edbauer is what role--if any--the work of J. L. Austin could play in an understanding of how utterances themselves function, either in a network (as with Latour and, seemingly, Edbauer) or a rhetorical situation (Bitzer and Vatz). In How To Do Things With Words, Austin presents a speech act theory in which not all utterances are simply truth-evaluable--some actually perform the function described, an action of binding power. Obvious examples include legal sentencing, marriage ceremonies, the reading of wills, the christening of ships (and perhaps naming, in general). (Judith Butler appropriated Austin's work in describing how gender is produced as an effect of a regulatory discourse--one that requires ritualized repetition of behavior, including performative utterances).

I thought about this last week in terms of Latour because it occured to me that utterances are themselves included as actors in networks and that, following Austin, they very well should. My thoughts returned to Austin this week when Bitzer talks about rhetoric as "a mode for altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action" (3). This sounded very much like Austin to me. Bitzer then qualifies his formulation, of course, by going on to say that the rhetor "alters reality by bringing into existence a discourse of such a character that the audience, in thought and action, is so engaged that it becomes mediator of change" (4); and Bitzer grounds the power of rhetoric in a situation that calls it forth--the situation is "the very ground of rhetoric" (5). If anything, reality determines the meaning of an utterance for Bitzer, rather than the utterance performing and giving meaning--"rhetorical discourse comes into existence as a response to a situation..." (5). But Bitzer also gives both rhetorical discourse and the rhetor their due places in what might be dubbed a kind of network. On page 8 he concludes his remarks on the constituents of the rhetorical situation by saying that, "These three constituents--exigence, audience, constraints--comprise everything relevant in a rhetorical situation. When the orator, invited by the situation, enters it and creates and presents discourse, then both he and his speech are additional constituents."

Vatz's argument does a 180 and goes the other way, of course: he argues against Bitzer's claims in such a way that he passes Austin and moves close to what Latour bemoans as social constructivism in the passages I discussed last week. Vatz asserts that "meaning is not discovered in situations, but created by rhetors" in a "translation" that conveys not a "situation's reality, but... the rhetor's arbitrary choice of characterization" (157). Meaning, thus, is not "intrinsic to situations" as Bitzer contends, but rather meaning is "a consequence of rhetorical creation" (158), "Thus rhetoric is a cause not an effect of meaning" (160).

My impulse is to say that while I found Bitzer's contentions intellectually unsatisfying at best, Vatz's critique bottoms out towards the end. His statement on page 160 that "one cannot maintain that reports of anything are indistinguishable from the thing itself" adequately summarizes what I object to--and an example he gives that "the killing of a president of this country at this time is not a real threat to the people in any measurable way" spells out on its face my objection (whatever you exaggerate you weaken). I think both formulations are simple-minded--rhetoric does not create reality, a slope that I feel Vatz slips towards, any more than reality calls forth rhetorical statements. Edbauer seems to split the difference, much in the same that I'd say Latour does in his own way. I'll expand on that in my next post.

Rhetorical Ecologies

2007-04-08T21:24:00.000-06:00

I liked the way Jenny Edbauer traced the rhetorical ecology, or the “range of processes and encounters” (6) of “Keep Austin Weird.” I thought this might be a good assignment for students – trace the rhetorical ecology of something. Some ideas: Trace the way brands become commonplace names for things (I think there's a word for this), like Kleenex or Xerox. You could also trace how TV or movie catchphrases are circulated (e.g. “yadda, yadda, yadda” or “I'll be back”) In fact, lots of things from popular culture would work – re-makes of movies, covers of songs, how books influence authors. One example I thought of would be our own Mike Kardos' piece on the Missouri Review blog about how people have co-opted the title of Carver's “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Politics might be a fruitful angle as well. I'm thinking specifically of how the phrase “partial-birth abortion” was created by the pro-life movement and then circulated into commonplace usage.

Edbauer and de Certeau

2007-04-08T17:47:00.000-06:00

Whereas Bitzer pushes for LaTourian rigidity in his definition of what constitutes a rhetorical situation, Edbauer pushes for LaTourian a complete reworking of the notion of rhetorical situation, arguing for a complete paradigm shift. Like LaTour, Edbauer goes against the grain, suggesting that the rhetorical situation doesn’t already exist: “[. . .] there can be no pure exigence [. . .] the exigence does not exist perse, but is instead an amalgamation of processes and encounters” (8). The language here echoes LaTour—exigence is not a given, and, thus, the rhetorical situation does not exist a priori (“the social does not reside in fixed sites” (9). We can only sense a rhetorical situation by examining the nodes within the network. These nodes include people, things, concepts, and feelings. Edbauer’s example of Austin Texas’ “weird” slogan is a terrific example.

I was also struck by Edbauer’s discussion of the city; actually she mostly cites Amin and Thrift. Edbauer, of course, uses the complicated notion of city as a metaphor for her revision of rhetoric. But it’s interesting to note that in his famous chapter “Walking the City” from his book The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau ponders the relationship between urban movement and writing. Certeau’s chapter here is more or less a direct response to Foucault’s “Panopticism” (itself modeled on Bentham’s notion of the panopticon). Whereas Foucault’s Panopticism examines power structures from the top down (power as tower-like, yet, strangely, decentralized and democratic (in the sense that all people tacitly agree to participate in surveillance of the public), de Certeau’s piece looks at the panopticon from the bottom up; he looks at how the subjects of the panopticon respond, and rebel, in their small ways. The idea of the city, de Certeau suggests, is an imposition of control. City planners create rigid grids that are designed to inscribe control (one must walk here, not there); clearly indicated street names act as markers to make sure that we do not get lost. However, people walk as they wish: they create shortcuts, they ignore the names of streets (or they make personal meaning out of a street name that has no connection to the meaning intended). In short, people resist the order imposed by the urban grid. De Certeau writes:

“Rather than remaining within the field of a discourse [de Certeau sees walking
discourse] [. . .] one can try another path: one can analyze the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization” (96)

De Certeau’s language is pretty dense here (earlier in the piece, he refers to an “erotics of knowledge, which made me grimace in pain), but he’s essentially talking about the ways in which people carve out their own existences, despite the system that has been put into place. Later in the chapter, de Certeau compares walking explicitly to writing, which is interesting since it echoes Edbauer’s move from city to rhetoric. De Certeau writes, “The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns (or tours) and detours that can be compared to “turns of phrase” or “stylistic figures.” Anyway, I’m sorry if most of this discussion has been dull or tangential, but anyone whose interest was piqued by Edbauer’s examination of the city might check out the de Certeau book/chapter.

Finally, the example of Cingular’s cooption of the anti-corporate “Keep Austin Weird” slogan reminded me of the earlier piece we read this term by James Gee: “The New Literacy Studies and the ‘Social Turn.’” In that piece, Gee questioned whether rhetoric is intrinsically progressive. His answer, of course, was “not always.” He devoted several rich and interesting paragraphs to examples of ways in which corporations use “the social turn” to increase their profit margins. Edbauer’s example of Cingular seems a prime example of a conservative group’s (in this case a corporation) absorption of radical discourse (Austin’s largely liberal, anti-“big business” slogan).

My On Again/ Off Again Relationship with The Rhetorical Situation

2007-04-08T15:33:00.000-06:00

The Rhetorical Situation is a tricky thing. I’ve tried to remove it from my own understanding of rhetoric quite a few times, but I haven’t been successful. It seems to be rather indispensable. I genuinely agree with Vatz’s articulation of the academic and ethical problems with The Rhetorical Situation. Still, every time I conceptualize discourse in my mind, the rhetorical situation sneaks into my design.

Like Vatz, I believe that rhetors are capable of creating exigences. Exigences don’t exist until someone points a public’s attention in a particular direction. There exists no shortage of contemporary social and political examples of groups racing to define an issue so that they can demonstrate how their solution best solves the problem or responds to the situation. When Bush tried to reform social security, you could usually predict a person’s opinion on the issue based on whether they thought his program was designed to “privatize” or “personalize” social security. To define/describe/create an exigence or a situation is to prescribe a response.

Still, while meaning certainly lies in people and not situations, I believe rhetors craft messages that rely on situations for their meaning and value. No utterance can be interpreted without context. This is so natural that when we hear a comment for which we have little or no context, we usually create ourselves so that the comment makes more sense. Socio-political context cannot be overlooked when crafting a message. There are indeed limits or constraints to what a speaker can get away with. It might be important to recognize that those constraints are also rhetorically constructed, but that doesn’t make them any less important or influential in any set of circumstances.

While I would disagree with Bitzer’s idea that the Rhetorical Situation determines discourse, I would argue that rhetor’s necessarily look to situational factors when generating discourse. Aristotle defined rhetoric as the “search for the available means of persuasion” and even though artistic proofs might come from within the rhetor, she must still look to audience and context to discern which persuasive techniques are most likely to work. The entire field of rhetorical criticism was originally based on this idea. Traditional or neo-Aristotelian methods of criticism have certainly fallen out of favor, its hard to begin to understand what a speaker has done, or how she has done it without first accounting for situational elements.

If this blurb seemed to chase its own tail, then I think I have accurately reproduced the way the Rhetorical Situation dilemma spins around in my mind. I can try to summarize by saying that I take issue with the determinism expressed by Bitzer, but I still see the situation as crucial to the production and study of rhetoric. In actuality, I think my relationship with the rhetorical situation is way more complicated than that. But we'll work it out.

Edbauer

2007-04-08T09:02:00.000-06:00

Edbauer

This article was great! I love articles that make me think and rethink any situation, and this one had me thinking about all manner of things, from Latour to the classroom. In speaking about Phelps’ critique she states, “That is, the elements of a rhetorical situation can be re-read against the historical fluxes in which they move” (3). She then goes on to explain, “The rhetorical situation is part of what we might call, borrowing from Phelps, an ongoing social flux. Situation bleeds into the concatenation of public interaction. Public interactions bleed into wider social processes. The elements of rhetorical situation may simply bleed (3). This, of course, made me think of Latour and his network, or ANT. However, I think she “invented” in my mind something a bit different from Latour.

She states, “Rather a rhetoric emerges already infected by the viral intensities that are circulating in the social field. Moreover, this same rhetoric will go on to evolve in apparallel ways:” (6). While Latour’s notion of networking evolves from a star burst—lines shooting from a central blast—Edbauer makes me wonder if he hasn’t gotten his metaphor a little off. Think of it this way, rather than lines shooting straight out from a star, how about a large rock in a pond or lake. As the concentric circles move away from the point of impact the circles still maintain their original shape, but they grow in size and in ability to effect things beyond that first impact. The network is maintained, but rather than a straight shot there is a circle of growth and mutation as growth is maintained. The original survives as it mutates, creates, and perhaps corrects. She states, “The intensity, force and circulatory range of a rhetoric are always expanding through the mutations and new exposures attached to that given rhetoric, much like a virus” (5).

She also made me wonder about the universities composition program. She quotes Margaret Syverson, “Our theories of composition have been somewhat atomistic, focusing on individual writers, individual texts, isolated acts, processes, or artifacts” (5).
We see young writers as budding in composition, and then through other writing intensive courses as flowering. But I wonder what would happen if we broadened our horizons and theirs. First year students would take English 1000, but in the junior year, after having taken some of those writing intensive course, would take another course in composition. The point of this being that by adding lived experience, knowledge obtained through classes, we could encourage this more developed writer to take the skills further. Incorporation of lived experience and academic knowledge into what they have written about. Finding out what connections these students may find between History and Literature and the development of Literature. What types of thinking learned through college algebra have they learned that might spark better writing. Rather than simply teaching them basic academic writing, bring life experience in to create a course that asks them to synthesize this knowledge with a new, perhaps grander, writing experience.

That’s all.

Bitzer vs. Vatz

2007-04-08T08:37:00.000-06:00

When I began reading the Bitzer article I began disagreeing with it. He makes good points about the influence of context, etc., but his idea that “situations” invoke or create the rhetoric just didn’t suit me. While I’ve since read the Vatz and the Edbauer, at the time I had my own arguments. I’ve met people who create crisis through rhetoric. These are not highly public people, but people that belong to my small circle of those I’m acquainted with. By phrasing something in a particular way, e.g., “The neighbor is intoxicated”, as opposed to, “So and So is having a drunken fit” the situation takes on a different tenor. Rather than the rhetoric fitting the situation, the situation is made to fit the perception of the person uttering the words. Bitzer states, “Thus the second characteristic of rhetorical situation is that it invites a fitting response, a response that fits the situation” (Bitzer 9). While this can be true, I don’t believe it to be true in all situations.

Vatz states, “The world is a scene of inexhaustible events which all compete to impinge on what Kenneth Burke calls our ‘sliver of reality’” (Vatz 156). So, in effect, he is agreeing in part with Latour. Everything strikes out in one way or another to have an impact on that which surrounds it. Vatz goes on to speak of meaning, “Therefore, meaning is not discovered in situations, but created by rhetors” (Vatz 157). So, the meanings from the “scene of inexhaustible events” merges with our “sliver of reality” to create a rhetor who creates meaning. He goes on to tell us, “In short, the rhetor is responsible for what he chooses to make salient” (158). This, to me, creates a more “salient” role of rhetoric within the academic, public, and private versions of the lives we live.

That’s all.

Message “parasitically invades” students

2007-04-07T20:37:00.000-06:00

Bitzer's view of rhetorical situations also made me think about the way that advertisers convince you that you need something. They tell you that you need, say, the Ipod with the TV screen or the Thighmaster to be happy. Bitzer is like the guy who sees an ad for a Blackberry and is convinced that he can't live without it – he's certain there was a set of circumstances in his life that necessitated its purchase. Vatz is like the guy who realizes the power of advertising – that such needs are “created” and not “found.” They convince you that there was a rhetorical situation there already, when in fact they created it.

I use the concept of the rhetorical situation to respond to students who don't like my standards for grading. I teach personal writing, which many students perceive as “what I think” and “what I feel.” For example, a student told me last week that topic sentences are too constraining on her writing. I try to get them to see that personal writing is a rhetorical situation like any other where one must take into account audience and constraints, etc. Reflecting now on this practice, I realize it's more Bitzerian than Vatzian because I tell them that in the “real world,” you will always need to write for a certain audience under certain conditions. This always seems deeply unfair to them.

I too wondered why Jenny Edbauer called Vatz “infamous.”

Bitzer and LaTour as Buddies? Maybe?

2007-04-06T20:32:00.000-06:00

Lloyd F. Bitzer published "The Rhetorical Situation" in 1968, but I swear I hear premonitions of LaTour. It is easy, I am guessing, from our post-post-modern positions (postmodern children that we are) to critique Bitzer from forty years' difference (Bitzer finds comfort in the "real," the objectively verifiable), but consider the excerpt from Bitzer's piece:

"Any exigence is an imperfection marked by urgency...An exigence which can not be modified is not rhetorical...thus, whatever comes about of necessity and cannot be changed...are exigences to be sure, but they are not rhetorical."

Am I the only one who hears echoes in LaTour? Simply replace "exigency" with the word "the social." Bitzer's discussion of what constitutes a rhetorical situation sounds a lot like LaTour's discussion of what constitutes the social. For Bitzer, a rhetorical situation exists when there is mediation ("an exigence which can be modified only by means other than discourse is not rhetorical; thus, an exigence is not rhetorical when its modification requires merely one's own action or the application of a tool, but neither requires nor invites the assistance of discourse"). For LaTour, the social only really exists when the players involved are true mediators. Is Bitzer arguing for anything radically different? Okay, in some ways yes? But Bitzer seems to be pushing for the same LaTourian rigidity in asking that a rhetorical situation be filled with full-fledged mediators.

I'll have more to say about Bitzer (and Vatz) later, but I was pumped after noticing the LaTourian turn forty years before such a turn actually turned.

Just some things....

2007-04-06T17:57:00.000-06:00

So far, and before my computer dies....

Vatz could introduce a quote with ANYTHING but "As ______________ says/states/writes" and it wouldn't drive me up the wall.

We SHOULD use nouns as verbs. We should also use "concatenate" a lot, as that really IS what we're called upon to do in virtually every course, paper, or discussion. And finally, "the elements of rhetorical situation simply bleed" (9) is, I think, brilliant. And true.

While I taught "the rhetorical stance" this semester, and I think my students found it helpful, it's still in an elemental form. I also noted that most, if not all the kids in both of my sections hadn't even seen my (crude) version of the sort of triangle system referred to--I think I roughly sketched the "speaker"---"message"---"receiver"---"feedback" loop, when we were discussing Booth's article, but I wonder whether talking about ecologies would have been better?

I guess my thinking, in terms of getting the students to concatenate (anything) is that BOTH might be the way to go. Haven't finished Jenny's piece yet, so maybe she'll tell me. My query to you all then, is what parts of this do you actually use in the classroom/plan to use in the classroom....and for Mark in particular, what sort of schema are they teaching in Comm? While I remember public speaking, it was poorly taught (by the soccer coach at school...d'oh) and althought we got a badly sketched diagram, I wonder what's really going on....

Down to almost no battery at all, gotta get this to post.

Concatenate.

Ritualized Salience

2007-04-05T13:09:00.000-06:00

Vatz's article succinctly presents Bitzer's, and lists his reasons for disagreeing with Bitzer. The wonderful Jenny Edbauer calls it "infamous," which is intriguing, and makes me wonder what its overall impact has been, if anyone happens to know and feels like sharing :). He seems to start from the position that we create meaning, and to call different aspects of Bitzer's article into question based on that given. The idea that we're socially constructed seems to underly his position, which ties his vision in with those of most of the authors we've read for this course, with the exceptions, possibly, of Gaonkar and Latour.

His arguments bring up a really basic question that ties in to rhetoric's pedagogical applications. Can the significance of absolutely every situation be thought of as rhetorically constructed, when some situations seem to be thought significant in virtually every discourse community? His discussion of assassination started me wondering what discourse community exists where the death of a leader would not be thought significant. Can we always say that historic events gain significance because of "ritualized salience"? If we think so, believing rhetoric to be the source of meaning, can we teach the approach?

Collaborative Text Editing (via SubEthaEdit)

2007-04-02T22:45:00.000-06:00

Here's the program I was talking about during class that we'll be using at the "Reach and Teach the Digital Native" conference tomorrow--it sounds intriguing. From Brian S. Brookes, Associate Dean of the School of Journalism (here at MU):

"During the Digital Campus Institute @ Missouri we’ll be working together to explore ways to “Reach and Teach the Digital Native.” SubEthaEdit is a text editor that facilitates collaboration through Apple’s Bonjour technology. With SubEthaEdit many participants will be able to edit the same text document, live, in realtime. Every user is able to type anywhere in the text without locking parts of the text for other users, making SubEthaEdit just as easy to use as a traditional text editor."

A free 30-day trial version of SubEthaEdit can be downloaded from http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit

Latour Pt. 2 Cmap

2007-04-02T16:20:00.000-06:00

Redefining networks

2007-04-02T13:33:00.000-06:00

Court's post about the multiplex and uniplex conceptions of social networks got me thinking about the varied uses of "network" as a term. I'm wondering whether the different meanings (social network, computer network, actor network, etc.), all somewhat similar to begin with, are coming to overlap--maybe it's just that they're overlapping in my thinking. But Donna's observation about web 2.0's increased resemblance to a Latourian network got me thinking that at least those two are merging.

A Bridge to Next Week

2007-04-02T09:30:00.000-06:00

There are several places in which Latour makes comments that support or hint at a couple key rhetorical concepts. The first is Lloyd Bitzer’s notion of the rhetorical situation, which is assigned reading for next week. A second, and related concept is that of rhetorical genre.

Latour writes, “When, for one reason or another, you happen to come to the stage, you become quickly aware that most of the ingredients composing the scene have not been brought there by you…” (p. 165-166). Basically, we are constantly prompted by and encouraged to respond to particular complexes of people, things, events etc. These situations are not of our own creation, but we must navigate them nonetheless. Bitzer (1968) went so far as to basically suggest that all human interaction was dependent on the details of the rhetorical situation. Our task in any rhetorical situation is to fashion our discourse in such a way that it fits the constraints of that situation and remedies the exigence or imperfection that moved us to respond in the first place. Of course Bitzer’s explanation is much more complicated than that, but I believe Bitzer and Latour are seeing our position as actors within a collective very similarly.

Genre theory, which is typically based in the rhetorical situation, also suggests that the scene has a major influence on our actions and behavior. Edwin Black (1965) wrote, “First, we must assume that there is a limited number of situations in which a rhetor can find himself…Second, we must assume that there is a limited number of ways a rhetor can and will respond rhetorically to any given situational type…Third, we must assume that the recurrence of a given situational type through history will provide the critic with information on the rhetorical responses available in that situation” (p.133). Basically, genre theory and practice, by helping us understand and predict social interaction, can be understood as a helpful aid to tracing associations.

To understand the “ingredients” in any situation seems to be part of the task for ANT. Latour writes, “Yes, we should follow the suggestion that interactions are overflowed by many ingredients already in place that come from other times, other spaces and other agents; yes, we should accepts the idea of moving away to some other sites in order to find the sources of those many ingredients” (p. 171). ANT obviously has different, and perhaps grander goals in mind, so maybe instead of arguing that genre theory fits some of ANT’s criteria, it would be more useful to argue that genre studies could be improved by using some ANT. But then again, I already have a final paper topic.

Social Determination of facts, inscriptions, and other points of clarification

2007-04-01T23:38:00.000-06:00

By points of clarification, I mean, of course, for myself, but one always hopes that one's writing is both received well and that it is somehow productive for others. There have been a few spots where Latour references his earlier work (I discussed one such instance with We Have Never Been Modern last week); one such instance in Part II occurs on page 223, when in footnote No. 305 he states that, "I introduced the expression of inscription devices in Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1986), Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts."

The subtitle of that (seminal) work led me (and Latour, it seems) back to some choppy waters in Part I, in which Latour distinguishes ANT from social constructivism (starting on page 88, in a section entitled "Constructivism vs. social constructivism"). Latour outlines what it means to be "constructed" according to ANT, something very different than what it means in social constructivist modes of critique; and Latour hints that this is a distinction that he has maintained all along, going back to his work in Laboratory Life, which I myself have since turned to in order to try and parse it out. On page 91-2, Latour appears to be discussing the lumping of ANT with the so-called "strong programme" of what might be productively distinguished as social determinism (thought it's often referred to as "social constructivism") in science studies (though Latour explicitly uses social constructivism in the social sciences and humanities). Latour--if I'm understanding him--takes exception to this association:

On the one hand, it seemed easy enough to reclaim a sturdy meaning for this much maligned term construction: we simply had to use the new definition of social that was reviewed in the earlier chapters of this book.... 'constructivism' should not be confused with 'social constructivism'. When we say that a fact is constructed, we simply mean that we account for the solid objective reality by mobilizing various entities whose assemblage could fail; 'social constructivism' means, on the other hand, that we replace what this reality is made of with some other stuff, the social in which it is 'really' built. An account about the heterogenous genesis of a building is substituted by another one dealing with the homogeneous social matter which is built. To bring constructivism back to its feet, it's enough to see that once social means again association, the whole idea of a building made of social stuff vanishes. For any construction to take place, non-human entities have to play the major role and this is just what we wanted to say from the beginning with this rather innocuous word.

But obviously this rescue operation was not enough since the rest of the social sciences seemed to share a completely different notion of the same term. How could that be? Our mistake was that since we had never shared the idea that construction could mean a reduction to only one type of material, we produced antibodies against the accusation that we had reduced facts to 'mere construction' only very slowly. Since it was obvious to us that 'social construction' meant a renewed attention to the number of heterogeneous realities entering into the fabrication of some state of affairs, it took years for us to react in a balanced way to the absurd theories with which we appeared to be associated. Even though constructivism was for us a synonym for an increase in realism, we were feted by our colleagues in social critique as having shown at last that "even science is bunk'! It took me a long time to realize the danger of an expression that, in the hands our our 'best friends', apparently meant some type of revenge against the solidity of scientific facts and an expose of their claim to truth. They seemed to imply that we were doing for science what they were so proud of having done for religion, art, law, culture, and everything the rest of us believe in, namely reducing it to dust by showing it was made up....

No wonder that our excitement in showing the 'social construction of scientific fact' was met with such fury by the actors themselves!... The substitution of the social with other stuff seems to every actor a catastrophic loss to be adamently resisted--and rightly so! If, however, the word social is not used to replace one kind of stuff by another, but is used instead to deploy the associations that have rendered some state of affairs solid and durable, then another social theory might become audible at last.

How could there be, we wondered, such a divide in the basic duties of social science? This is why it slowly dawned on us that there was something deeply flawed not only in the standard philosophy of science, but also in the standard social theories used to account for other domains than science. This is what made ANT scholars at first look either too critical--they were accused of attacking 'even' matters of fact and of not 'believing' in 'Nature' or in 'outside reality'--or much too naive--they believed in the agencies of 'real things' that were 'out there'. In effect, what ANT was trying to modify was simply the use of the whole critical repertoire by abandoning simultaneously the use of Nature and the use of Society, which had been invented to reveal 'behind' social phenomena what was 'really taking place'. This, however, meant a complete reinterpretation of the experiment that we had conducted, at first unwittingly, when trying to account sociologically for the production of science.

Latour, then, distinguishes ANT from social constructivism in the social sciences and the humanities, as well as (it appears any way) the strong programme in science studies: in a footnote--No. 116--on page 93, Latour asserts that the critique made against ANT that it "attack[ed] 'even' matters of fact and of not 'believing' in 'Nature' or in 'outside reality'" was "offered during the 'Science Wars'." I have since realized that I've been hung up on this distinction between ANT and the strong programme for a while in reading the first part of Reassembling, but turning to Laboratory Life and putting it in context with some back story in the history of the philosophy of science, I think I might have a hold on it now. So I want to try to flesh out a bit how ANT in general and Latour's work in particular is distinct from social constructivism (or, alternatively, social constructionism--or sociological constructionism--or simple constructivism--or radical constructivism... an examination of any of these would be seemingly interesting).

First, some back story: in An Invitation to Social Construction, Kenneth J. Gergen points out that as early as 1929--when Karl Mannheim published his Ideology and Utopia--a competing notion that scientific knowledge is socially constructed had challenged the essentialism or naturalism of science, this idea that science is a neutral, value-free quest for Truth. Mannheim, for example, observed that theoretical committments on the part of scientists may be attributed to social rather than empirical motivations, that groups of scientists often emerge around theories and that disagreements over theories are therefore matters of group conflict, that what is taken for granted to be scientific fact is a byproduct of a social process. Mannheim's work was highly influential, and soon other social critiques of science followed: Ludwig Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935), Peter Winch's The Idea of a Social Science (1946), George Gurvitch's The Social Frameworks of Knowledge (1966), and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1966) built up a tradition of socially critiquing science. Berger and Luckmann, for example, traced the scientist's interaction with the world to the social sphere, proposing that we are all socialized into "plausibility structures," conceptual understandings of the world and rational supports which help foster the belief that these structures are natural, that reality as we experience it should be taken for granted (from page 26):

I apprehend the reality of everyday life as an ordered reality. Its phenomena are prearranged in patterns that seem to be independent of my apprehension of them... The language used in everyday life continuously provides me with the necessary objectification and posits the order within which these make sense and within which everyday life has meaning for me... In this manner language marks the co-ordinates of my life in society and fills that life with meaningful objects.

To me, this sounds a whole lot like ANT, at least superficially (Berger and Luckmann, for example, include an account of how clocks have altered the way we experience time and order our lives accordingly), but this is part of the tradition that Latour seemingly is rejecting in Reassembling. Although he doesn't refer to him (or indeed, any of the names I have cited so far), Latour also appears to reject Thomas Kuhn's work along the same lines. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was at the center of the so-called "Science Wars", and indeed that work makes some interesting claims in terms of scrutinizing science as a social activity, and it interrogates (forgive me) the Enlightenment-inherited assumption that science is progressive, that with continued research and testing we will eventually arrive at the Truth (from 170: "Perhaps... scientific progress is not quite what we had taken it to be.... We may, to be more precise, have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigms carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth").

For any one who wants a (vulgar) summary of what I think is relevant here, Kuhn asserted that scientists work from "...some accepted examples of actual scientific practice...[which] provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research"--these models are what Kuhn refers to as paradigms. Kuhn argued that science is a kind of puzzle-solving activity which is always subsumed in a belif system, the dominant paradigm ("normal science"). Removing the heretofore-present blinders of cumulative histories, disciplines could view thier histories in terms of these non-cumulative theoretical paradigms of "normal science," followed by accumlations of anomalies that are incommensurate with the dominant paradigm; once enough of these anomalies accumlate a critical mass is reached at which point a "scientific revolution" occurs, leading to new normal science. (It might be worth mentioning that Kuhn speculated that the social sciences--and certainly the humanities--are "pre-paradigmatic").

Kuhn argued for the social construction of scientific change and the consequent incommensurability of successive paradigms. Kuhn also emphasized the networks of interrelated commitments and practitioneers whose peer judgment provided consensus for establishing and elaborating theories. Again, Kuhn's work seems to echo rather than run against that of Latour's. But Kuhn doesn't have much to say about the actual social organization that is involved with a paradigm-shift; and his examples of paradigm-shifts are taken from classical science: the Copernican Revolution is the archetype example; and so Kuhn's examples cover centuries rather than the decade-to-decade or even year-to-year revolutions that occur in contemporary science. This acceleration or exhaustion might to similar developments that Latour outlines and this could thus be what distinguishes Latour's project from what has come before. Kuhn has lamented (much like Latour does above) the reception of his work, however; he included a postscript to the 1970 revision of Structure that made it clear that his work was received in a more radical light than he cared for (and maybe intended) and he has since expressed his regrets for this reception (see, for example, The Essential Tension, 1977).

Aside from the inclusion of networks, another possible bridge between Kuhn and Latour is Joseph Rouse's Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science. Rouse imagines a "radical Kuhn" who replaces "communities of practioners" with "communities of believers," thus foregrounding that competing theories are evaluated not by comparison to one another on their own merits, but rather with a "history is written by the winners" mentality (32). Rouse argues that science is to be understood as a field of practices rather than as what Latour himself (in Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society) refers to as "ready-made science," science already reified for textbook consumption. Latour (and Rouse) advocates "science in the making," the practice of scientific work itself, a process that is never predictable or controllable in advance (4). If nothing else, however, Gergen points out that these social determinist or contructivist arguments underscore the importance of interpretive communities in shaping heretofore naturalized scientific practices (35). But as Latour gestures, these arguments have often been taken to the extreme ("the absurd theories with which we appeared to be associated"), and so ANT and other modes of critique have increasingly sought to foreground the relational processes that emerge from actants (persons, objects, surroundings--Society and Nature). Rather than being constructed by social forces, science is the product of scientists, technologies, spaces, ideas, etc. acting as full participants in a complex relationships out of which mutual understanding is achieved.

Here we finally arrive back at the footnote (No. 305) that prompted me to write this out for myself (and any one else who might benefit): "the expression of inscription devices" that Latour casually mentions on page 223. In Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, these inscription devices are part of a larger process of conscriptioin that Latour discusses in terms of how a scientific fact is determined. Conscription (literally, "writing with"--an interesting gloss, but also think of conscription in terms of drafting soldiers) is the process of appropriating support for a preposed fact and silencing detractions from it. Any statement can be proposed as fact, but on its face it's not convincing--any number of objections can be raised. The problem of the scientist is to enlist support and silence dissent; and support is conscripted from four domains: allies, a social network of those who support one's interpretations, enlisted to do so through social practices within science; former texts, the established repetoire of "what is known" is drawn upon in a type of argument from authority; rhetorical devices [interesting for our purposes here], prestige forms that convey a "truth-telling capacity" such as the use of numbers, graphs, and arcane formulations that establish and reinforce the authority of the scientist by moving the reader further and further away from an understanding of what's being argued; and, finally, the inscription devices that Latour mentions in the footnote. Inscription devices are the machines and instruments used in science which produce non-linguistic representations to "write the world"--as long as science is accepted as truth, how these devices "measure the world as it is" stands in for the phenomenon itself.

"Scientific facts," then, emerge within actor networks that include both the social and natural world, both humans and technology and these facts are thus dependent on these networks. If one questions a scientific fact, one encounters a network of allies to defend it, a network of former texts that support it, as well as rhetorical and inscription devices that legitimate it as part of the assemblage. Each of these actants, then, is like a black box: if one tries to open it, to question its validity, one is directed to another black box and these black boxes exist in an interlocking assemblage of actants. Latour, it seems, wants to be careful here not to be associated with social constructivism because he does not question the reality of scientific facts, rather he wants to bring more reality to them("constructivism was for us a synonym for an increase in realism," 92)--to remove the mysticism from science and the claims that it is beyond scrutiny or interpretation or somehow above culture. If one substitutes "the social" for "science" (Latour was dealing with the social make-up of science) then one might see how, it seems, Latour wants to do away with Nature and Society, the categories "which had been invented to reveal 'behind' social phenomena what was 'really taking place'" (93). These categories collapse into each other when it's demonstrated that they actants from within each domain are interconnected in various assemblages.

This is how I've reconciled the history of social constructivism with ANT for myself, using Latour's words in Reassembling and elsewhere, but I may be way off. If so, I hope someone will help me out.

"Welcome to the (In)Human Network"

2007-04-01T21:53:00.000-06:00

How's that for using parentheses? I'm playing off the ad campaign by Cisco Systems... their slogan seems to take ANT and invert it, adding humans to what's understood as a network of non-human actants. This is just one digression that's emerged for me in the past few weeks while thinking about Latour. I'm interested in hearing what others might think about another of these digressions:

In the sociolinguistics course I'm in, we've been talking about concepts borrowed from sociology to explain how social networks influence linguistic usage--in any network, there's a relative degree of density and of muliplexity. Density refers to the extent to which members of a social network (actants) all interact with one another; if everybody knows in a network knows everyone else, then the network has a relatively high density. Multiplexity refers to the extent to which actants interact with each other in different social spheres: if the actants in a network work at the same place, live in the same neighborhood, attend the same church, spend free time with each other, etc., then the network is said to be multiplex; whereas a uniplex network consists of actors that interact with different people depending on the social sphere--their neighbors are not their co-workers, etc. This model has interesting implications in terms of class: lower class networks tend to be highly dense and multiplex, whereas middle class networks tend to exhibit relatively low density and are more uniplex. It seems to me that one can extrapolate how bringing the respective non-human actants that each class would typically interact with (factory machines--or now data entry technology--vs. other technologies, respective leisure activities, domestic sites, etc.) into the network would further illuminate these networks.

Name dropping

2007-04-01T21:51:00.000-06:00

At the CCCC's conference in NYC last week, I went to a reception for the University of Illinois, where I met a graduate student who “loved” Latour and had just read Sharon Crowley's Toward a Civil Discourse. He didn't seem to see the disjuncture between Latour's preaching on the goals of sociology and Crowley's methods of rhetorical analysis of fundamentalism. I was pleased to see that Latour himself could almost be speaking specifically of Crowley's project when he asks: “Why is it that when faced with religion, we tend to limit our inquiry to its 'social dimensions' and take as a scientific virtue not to study religion itself?” (233) or later on “Why not take seriously what members are obstinately saying?” (235). Crowley, of course, might object that it's difficult to take seriously someone like Tim LaHaye . . . I also enjoyed Latour's plea for sociologists to “treat humans as things” (255).

Also, because my paper for this class is on autoethnography, I wonder what Latour might think of that research method. Would he label it as an instance of actors being able to speak for themselves?

subjectivation, or adding strings

2007-04-01T21:30:00.000-06:00

The positive strain throughout Latour's work--his making good on the introductory promise to cast ANT as a means (not a theory, for God's sake, ANT is not a theory) of working beyond the skepticism of postructuralism--really becomes apparent in the second half. I was about to post on the near-absence of Bourdieu in places where we might expect to find him (like Foucault, Bourdieu's notion of the habitus seems relegated to footnotes or taken up by Mauss on pp 210-211); then, in the section I just mentioned, I came across a passage I liked for its sense of possibility:

"What I am trying to do here is simply show how the boundaries between sociology and psychology may be reshuffled for good. For this, there is only one solution: make every single entity populating the former insider come from the outside not as a negative constraint 'limiting subjectivity', but as a positive offer of subjectivation" (212-213).

Here Latour would seem to be taking on Foucault (on the subject of the "construction of human interior psyches") and Bourdieu, who would suggest that what seems interior, what seems like "second nature" or reflex, is embodiment of custom and comes from the exterior. The difference for Latour is that the exterior is not seen as a terminal terministic screen (a "negative constraint 'limiting subjectivity') as Bourdieu, some of Foucault, and certainly much of Baudrillard's work in the late 70's/early 80's might suggest. Relatedly, we're not described as "puppets manipulated, in spite of themselves, by so many invisible threads" so much as potential puppets (and potential puppeteers) more focused on the "something that happens along the strings that allows the marionettes to move" (213; 214). Or, a page later, Latour distills it down to "the outside is not a context 'made of' social forces and it doesn't 'determine' the inside" (215).

So, Latour offers interesting possibilities for relocating the idea of "agency" (partly the subject of my paper) and, potentially, for rethinking what the "end goals" are of "emancipating students" through the reading/writing tools of the social turn. An previous question we raised was, ok, so we put students through a Berlinesque semester, what do we hope to leave them with? Instead of a grimmer sense of "society is to blame and though we may never fully penetrate the infinite strata of mystification, we can at least read critically to warn others" (my imitation of myself, circa 1994), we have something like "being politically motivated now starts to take a different and more specific meaning: we look for ways to register the novelty of associations and explore how to assemble them in a satisfactory form."

Latour Goes to Nairobi

2007-04-01T14:26:00.000-06:00

Actually, that title sounds like an action comedy, maybe costarring Bruno, Foucault as a disembodied voice that gives orders in his cell phone, and the sassy Chris Carter as sidekick. Sorry to disappoint anyone who might have been expecting that :).

I found myself thinking about ANT last week, on my trip to Nairobi. Honestly, what I found myself doing was shoving it to the back of my consciousness, as this glint of academia to stay segregated from the rugged reality around me. Said reality got the most rugged in Kibera, the slum on the edge of Nairobi that's the largest slum in sub-Saharan Africa, containing somewhere between one and two million people (no one really knows). I always thought of a slum in the St. Louis sense, meaning rundown brick houses with unemployed residents hanging out on porches, and the ever-present, internal injunction to leave before it got dark.

Kibera is like a city imported from another planet, one where the streets are bare clay and raw sewage, shrinking from drive-able paths to alleys where you have to clamber down stones and the walls are close enough to catch you if you fall. Those walls are all either corrugated tin, clay fortified by sticks, or the rare concrete with fossilized oozes of mortar, and they bristle children's faces through the windows that are never glass, only holes. The children there clamber along, and grab your hand to be pulled wherever you might be going, and chirp "how are you?," the one phrase in English they may know. The adults sit in any kind of shade, some in tatters, some in bright suits, and I knew I was really through the looking glass when I saw a group of them standing around the back of a pickup truck, and my dad told me they'd been loading a body wrapped in a sheet.

Every once in awhile, as I was walking there, or teaching the kids at the school we visited how to make paper airplanes, or trying to breathe without letting in the everpresent smell of Kibera, I'd wonder how I could possibly relate all of this to ANT. What does post-social theory have to do with the girl slightly larger than a toddler, crammed behind a wooden desk, who is six and may get to college if she survives? Thinking about it more now, I can start to see connections: these are people whose society is taken for granted as asymmetrical, and resources are actors in their lives, and they live without the old sense of hierarchy--the chiefs that run different parts of Kibera seem to do so with the understanding that the people are really in charge.

Herbert, husband of the principal of the school, said that the government's attempts to make the slum less visible to the world, by bulldozing portions of it, or otherwise trying to reduce it in size, only has the effect of making people mad. They have some autonomy by virtue of having almost nothing. It's not an enviable position of luxurious anarchy; it does, however, make some of Latour's techniques make more sense. The focus on heterogeneity, on avoiding essentialism, becomes absolutely clear when, in the middle of this absolute poverty, you find a movie theater, built out of tin, without a door, with Bollywood music piping out to those walking through the alley outside.

Court's thoughts about Foucault, and how he relates to Latour, also help my thinking about Kibera. Latour could definitely see Foucault as overdetermined, as too much of a brand name to throw around, and want to create a new space for understanding the social. Likewise, my experience there, where there's little built-in bureaucracy and more a world of ephemeral connections, makes a reconceptualization of the social, past the Foucauldian emphasis on power as its own entity, absolutely necessary.

Actors, fluidity, context and Latour

2007-04-01T12:26:00.000-06:00

Latour speaks of social theorists stating that they admit that, "society is a virtual reality." However, I wonder if that is true. I agree that what we call society is a "decaying monster" and that it does need to be rethought, but I'm not sure if it is a fiction. I argue this because I don't believe that something does NOT exist simply because it cannot be touched, felt, etc.

When Latour goes on to talk about keeping the social flat is a good way to put it. Rather than simply reassembling the social, he wants to create a new way to understanding the "very topography" of the social. He states, "As I have said earlier, action is always dislocated, articulated, delegated, translated. Thus, if any observer is faithful to the direction suggested by this overflow, she will be led away from any given interaction to some other places, other times, and other agencies that appear to have molded them into shape. This is, in fact, the act of tracing networks. However, despite his explanations I see this as being an extraordinary feat. Not only one that is complex, but one that is without end. He states later that ANT is simply that social theory which has turned "the Big Problem" of social science from a resource into a topic to solve it. But, I think it is still a "Big Topic." Perhaps I'm a pessimist and am making too much of the vastness of what Latour suggests. I don't know.

Of course, my whole point of view may have been skewered by trying to read this book while sitting on the deck of a ship. Made it more fun, though!

Context

2007-03-31T18:39:00.000-06:00

I am becoming a big fan of Latour – not only of his ideas, but also his wit, clever phrasing, examples, and use of exclamation points. Working through my thesis while reading this book has also given me a lots to think about in terms of the sociological dimension of my project.
Most saliently in this section, Latour discusses how sociologists place actors in Contexts. As he says in his typically deadpan tone: “At Context, there is no place to park” (167). When I first began reading for my thesis, I questioned why a researcher my choose to focus on the specific composing processes of a small number of students (such as in Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater's Academic Literacies). It seemed difficult to say something significant from such a small sample. But I found that in choosing to focus my study on a type of writing, I often had to elide the unique stories of individual students, focusing instead on Trends, Patterns, Themes, and indeed Contexts. And if I had to do the whole thing over again, I might just choose one or two students to focus on. I wonder if my impulse to do so stems from a resistance, similar to Latour's, of assigning actors to a context.

Still, the reason I chose not to focus on those individual stories is that at the end of the day, I wanted to find out something useful to my teaching. (I think this is the goal of much ethnographic writing research). My same concern remains for Latour: Generalizations may be artificial, but they are also helpful.

I'm also wondering about how avoiding Context keeps us from cynicism (which may be bred by an approach like Berlin's). If we stop seeing people as “products” of a context, does the lead to a more optimistic assessment of them? Or is this all a superfluous exercise in (Hairston alert!) “celebrating diversity”?

Interestingly, one of my student interviewees objected to a writing assignment, not unlike Berlin's, that asked her to research the larger social and historical context of one of her favorite articles of clothing. She's 19, but she sounds very Latourian, or maybe like one of Latour's Actors, desperate to be understood on her own terms. I quote her eloquent and significant argument here because it so clearly epitomizes the struggle that arises between the personal and the academic: students feel that the academic research alters the existing personal meaning.

Each garment has its own history for me, and I know the story of the garment and
I know the very specific cultural context of that garment because I wore it. And
for this paper I had to draw out and almost remove the personal aspect of it and
look for broad historical and broad cultural context which in some ways is
artificial . . . and so I just knew that a lot of things I was saying in this
paper, I was putting someone else's opinion on it and it wasn't necessarily
true.

Foucault/Latour judo

2007-03-19T15:45:00.000-06:00

I had the same reaction that Chad had to the absence of Foucault in the work of one so concerned with mapping associations--especially when reading We Have Never Been Modern. There Foucault is nary mentioned at all there, whereas in Reassembling he is regulated to footnotes, though at least still present. Latour seems to acknowledge Foucault's influence, his brilliance and his absence, in a way, in the footnote on 86. The footnote is to the following: "To the studied and modifiable skein of means to achieve powers, sociology, and especially critical sociology, has too often substituted an invisible, unmovable, and homogenous world of power for itself"; and the footnote reads:

That this lesson is easy to forget is shown dramatically by the transatlantic destiny of Michel Foucault. No one was more precise in his analytical decomposition of the tiny ingredients from which power is made and no one was more critical of social explanations. And yet, as soon as Foucault was translated, he was immediately turned into the one who had 'revealed' power relations _behind_ every innocuous activity: madness, natural history, sex, administration, etc. This proves again with what energy the notion of social explanation should be fought: even the genius of Foucault could not prevent such a total inversion.

It seems as if Latour does not bring Foucault directly in because Latour feels that Foucault's work has been so overdetermined, in a way--that it has so much baggage associated with it is a more honest way of saying it--that to bring in Foucault explicitly runs the risk of bringing in these associations which would lead many down the wrong path, so to speak. I think Latour acknowledges Foucault's influence however--and it seems to me that he does a bit of judo, to extend Chad's metaphor, in letting the reader go through his own work without bringing in Foucault except as in these digressive, suggestive footnotes. I hope so, any way, as Foucault is on my cmap for next week.

LaTour in Practice?

2007-03-19T14:48:00.000-06:00

Recent comp/rhet theorists, working against (somewhat) the expressivist approach of the 1970s, have sought to deconstruct the privileging of the "I" in the traditional essay. Thus, I see some similar goals in LaTour's de-centering. I do see how the LaTour reading fits 8040 nicely: we have been examining the social turn, so why not look at a text that questions the very notions of "social."

I did wonder if we find some sort of practical use in LaTour's book. How might LaTour's restructuring of the social help us as composition instructors? Does LaTour's work have any benefit for the first-year comp classroom? I'm tempted to leave that question hanging in the air, but I guess that I should take a stab at answering it.

In terms of what comp teachers can come away with, I think there's value in being challenged to rethink one's seemingly "natural" foundations. LaTour, by causing us to question what is the social, also causes us to question other issues, such as making the student the center of the essay. Progressive instructors, for instance, have designed assignments where students do not write from their point of view; in fact, they are encouraged to write from the point of view of someone entirely different from themselves. Collaborative assignments--not just busy work in small groups--can also helps students see value in writing that doesn't privilege the "I." In technical writing, for instance, this is common.

Regarding the first-year comp classroom, I wonder if there's a way to design an assignment inspired by LaTour's ideas. No mention of LaTour would ever occur in the class, of course, but perhaps there's a way to present a case study or example where students clearly see that what they assumed was the social is in fact much more complex. They then could be encouraged to make their own connections out in the world. This, in some ways, is a twist on Berlin's assignments in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures. But instead of examining texts (readings, films, television) as a way to comment on, for instance, class issues, the examination of texts would force students to reconsider their ideas about sociality. Or do you think this is all over the typical freshman head?

Foucault as Latour's Mr. Miyagi?

2007-03-19T14:45:00.000-06:00

One of the interesting parts of reading Latour has been to see his way of incorporating other scholarship. In Reassembling the Social, he's careful to acknowledge some of his influences, which include an eclectic range, Tarde and Diderot and many more, but he includes fewer names than, say, LeFevre. This becomes even more interesting when he defines a text that renders a network as one that, basically, shows its sources. He seems to do that less than some, but to wield his mentioning of others as a sign of ANT authenticity--not in an inauthentic way, at all, just as a special kind of mention. Instead of the normal parenthetical citations and quotes, he sets his sources off in boxes and footnotes.

This leads me to wonder who his primary influences might be, and to wonder about the presence of Foucault. My knowledge of Foucault's influence on ANT extends mostly to Law's use of him, in the one essay I've read, but some of Foucault's broad contributions seem to ghost the ANT project: his problematization of traditional systems of power, his persistent representation of complexity, and his refusal to essentialize or totalize. I could see Foucault teaching Latour how to fragment traditional sociology's practices, and represent that in writing--the post-structuralist equivalent of catching a fly with chopsticks . . . except, as Donna very helpfully pointed out last night, the post-structuralist project of applying broad terms to define things is one of ANT's main bugaboos.

If anyone has any thoughts, or would like to extend this to other martial arts metaphors :), I'd be grateful.

Thought collectives and notebooks

2007-03-19T08:56:00.001-06:00

Wow, there’s some good insight in the writings this week. Well, there probably always is, and I just miss it. Anyway. . .

On page 112-113 Latour talks about Fleck and Wasserman, and within that marked off reading I found something I though was very interesting. He quotes Fleck stating, ‘Truth is not ‘relative’ and certainly not ‘subjective’ in the popular sense of the word. It is always, or almost always, completely determined within a thought style. One can never say that the same thought is true for A and false for B. If A and B belong to the same thought collective, the thought will either be true or false for both. But if they belong to different thought collectives, it will just not be the same thought’ (113-14). What this quote did was bring me back to our discussion of Crowley, and the fact that were such different readings of her work. There is a difference in our “thought collectives” and this is why we read it differently. No form of logic, reason, or affective rhetoric can change these different readings, because our thoughts on the matter are from different collectives. What I would like to know, is if this is a real reason for different readings of different situations, is how or if “thought collectives” can be combined, changed, or whatever. Is a thought collective the same as a “social” group, (I know bad word), or is a thought collective a part of a larger collective. It’s an interesting concept, and one I wouldn’t mind exploring more thoroughly.

My second thought is about the notebooks Latour suggests that be used when examining the social. He states, “By contrast, it seems too often that sociologist of the social are simply trying to ‘fix a world on paper’ as if this activity was never in risk of failing” (127). However, further on he talks about getting back to basics, and maintaining four different notebooks during research. I have no doubt that everything is data, and by keeping track of everything one would accumulate good sources. But his notebook idea is very complex, and the only seemingly basic component is the fact he’s using paper instead of bites.

Did anybody else think the notebooks were a bit much?

Latour, LeFevre, Scott

2007-03-19T06:46:00.000-06:00

Going into this reading, I was pretty convinced that I’d wind up throwing away everything in Reinventing the Social. I figured that it would contradict what I already believed about the social. I assumed that it would raise some interesting points, but that I would ultimately have little use for it in my own work. It turns out, I was wrong. Perhaps I’ve unjustly colonized/appropriated/co-opted Reinventing the Social for my own purposes, but I now see it as completely compatible with works such as Invention as a Social Act and "Rhetoric as Epistemic”.

I think each work problematizes the idea of authorship. Invention as a Social Act, by LeFevre suggests that all invention (especially the kind supported by Durkheim) is a result of social processes. Each and every writer or actor is capable of influencing and being influenced by every other actor. “Rhetoric as Epistemic,” by Scott, similarly argues that ideas and knowledge are created through the symbolic interaction of human beings.

While I have little doubt that Latour would take exception with much of the language in these two texts, I think he actually has a lot in common with them. He clearly appreciates the idea that any particular text is a result of a multitude of actors who are connected in very complex ways. For instance, he says that a quality text highlights “the ability of each actor to make other actors do unexpected things” (p. 129). He calls a text, “a test on how many actors the writer is able to treat as mediators and how far he or she is able to achieve the social” (p. 128-129). In other words, a connection to other authors and actors is a necessity that ought to be recognized and encouraged.

Here’s the thing: I don’t really know if I’m right about all this, but if I really follow Latour it might not matter. He probably didn’t expect me to compare him to LeFevre and Scott. How about that for movement and energy? Anyway, I’d really like to know if people think I’ve misappropriated and misinterpreted Latour here. Sometimes I can’t tell whether this guy is really enthusiastic about a point in which he believes or is just using hyperbole to show me how silly something is so that he can refute it.

Latour vs. Lefevre and Berlin

2007-03-18T23:23:00.000-06:00

An early question of the semester was to consider how Latour would trouble, if not overhaul, the other social rhetoricians who would have mainly banked on what he would call the “sociology of the social” as opposed to the “sociology of associations.” When Latour suggests that “if you still believe groupings exist ‘by themselves,’ for instance the ‘individual,’ just try to remember how much labor had to be done before each of you could ‘take your life into your own hands,’” he seems to be treading close to our previous understanding of the social turn in rhetoric and composition (32). Why should we privilege one author as the author of a text? Is it just ego and tradition and a preference for sole credit that makes us refuse to acknowledge the vast network of collaboration that accounts for a published work? Latour poses considerations that mirror these and others we generated early in the semester: “How many admonitions from parents, teachers, bosses, partners, and colleagues before we learned that we had better be a group of our own (the ego)? And how quickly we forgot that lesson” (32).

However, as Latour begins to outline his five uncertainties (1. no pre-established groups; 2. actions and agency are uncertain and must be newly explored since we cannot attribute either to the social; 3. objects have agency or at least play a role beyond mere symbolic projection; 4. based on the previous three, agencies must never be introduced as matters of fact so much as matters of concern; and 5. as we move to “deployment not critique” and making the “social” first vanish in order to trace a network, we must undertake the writing of “risky accounts” that may often fail), we see that we are far from the comfort zone of Lefevre, Berlin, etc. Likewise, when Latour describes action as that “which is not fully transparent” (perhaps an understatement where the traces and uncertainties head) and that he wishes to “render them visible again” with his “odd expression” actor-network theory, we see that there is much in previous social-epistemic rhetoric that would be made to vanish so that something else—some network, trace, or reassembled association of the social—could become visible again. (44).

For a slightly more specific example, we could glance back at Berlin’s rhetoric. In his “Postmodern Predicament” section, after discussing Scholes’ “Textual Power” and Burke’s terministic screens (all language is ideological, all language “serves as a terministic screen”), Berlin argues that

“no single person is in control of language. Language is a social construction that shapes us as much as we shape it. In other words, language is a product of social relations and so is ineluctably involved in power and politics. Language constitutes arenas in which ideological battles are continually fought. The different language practices of different social groups are inscribed with ideological prescriptions, interpretations of experience that reinforce conceptions of what really exists, what is really good, and what is politically possible” (Berlin 92-93).

Latour would seem to agree that “no single person is in control of language,” but he would likely counter Berlin’s follow-up that “language is a product of social relations” and how “ineluctably involved” we can then say language is in “power and politics” (92). Latour might say that language produces the “social relations” and the constructs or figurations of “power and politics” as entities that then inform and shape what we’re trained to look for in language (trained, perhaps, by Berlin). Still, Latour might like the phrase about “interpretations of experience that reinforce conceptions of what really exists” to the extent that this opens the debate about ANT theorists “forgetting ‘power relations’ and ‘social inequalities’” (86).

Lefevre would be even more problematized by a Latourian analysis, as she privileges an a priori understanding of the social. Even as she examines a social perspective of rhetorical invention that seeks to overturn the long history of “composition” being “rooted in radical individualism,” she still suggests that the social act of writing is “one in which individuals interact with society and culture in a distinctive way to create something” and, in so doing, Lefevre seems guilty of the move Latour decries in social theory: the one where social theorists “never seem to tire in designating one entity as real, solid, proven, or entrenched while others are criticized as being artificial, imaginary, transitional” (Lefevre 121; Latour 28). Lefevre, and inevitably a Marxist such as Berlin, cannot avoid discourse that privileges either the “society” (in which individuals must “create”) or an already existing base and superstructure. Latour would seem to lead both theorists (and their students) to where the controversies arise in assuming a fixed, stable, identifiable notion of “society” or “late multi-national capitalist logic” and then ask that their associations be retraced without these “invisible hands.” Latour would also ask that students further disassemble the traces and previous associations before arriving at a (teacher-pleasing?) conclusion as to how “our society” has constructed inequalities within the judiciary or has only “fixed” racism by burying it deeper into the subsurface. He asks instead that we merely “leave aside all underlying frameworks” as the professor suggests to the Ph.D student in the “interlude” dialogue (156).

Latour pt. 1

2007-03-18T21:37:00.000-06:00

I wrote a paper on Latour a couple of years ago--and I used Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia for it, so I really enjoyed reading Chad's post. The main text of Latour's that I wrote about is We Have Never Been Modern, which I've referenced a couple of times before and which I think could be a productive text to bring in alongside Reassembling the Social, as I think the former really informs the latter. I had written out a long post comparing the two texts, finding ways "in" to Reassembling through We Have Never, but as I was about to post it, I thought better of it. I've been sitting on it for a couple of days now and I think I'll instead wait until next week--when I'll be facilitating the discussion on the second half of the book--to go ahead with it. I'm not sure if everyone will agree that it's necessary to bring it in, as I do, and I don't want divert *any* attention from the excellent work that Chad has done in directing the trajectory for this week.

I do want to say a bit about it in terms of where Latour himself brings in We Have Never along with something Faith commented on in her great post. Faith talked about the affinities she sees between what Latour is advocating and ethnography, and that speaks to an affinity I see as well and that Latour himself comments on a few times. Anthropology was one of my majors as an undergrad because, as I took courses that were cross-listed between English and Anthro (usually with a focus on Linguistics--my third major--or Folklore Studies), I saw how useful anthropology's use and development of the concept of culture could be in what I myself wanted to do. Latour sees this, as well, I think, and he uses it as a way to get into what ANT can become in terms of an alternative to modernism (including sociology). In Reassembling, he observes that ANT is "nothing but the recasting of the central hopes of social science" and that the latter has suffered from "a sort of confusion of duties... that their job was to define what the social world is made of... the task of politics" (40); and that "some sociologists, tired of the revolutionary period, found a way to shortcut the slow and painful process of composition and decided to sort out by themselves what were the most relevant units of society" (41). Latour goes on to comment on what he sees as the prime significance of this moment:

The simplest way was to get rid of the most extravagant and unpredictable ways in which actors themselves defined their own 'social context'. Social theorists began to play legislator, strongly encouraged in this endeavor by the state that was engaged in the ruthless task of modernizing. In addition, this gesture could pass for proof of scientific creativity as scientists since Kant have had to 'construct their own subject'. Human actors were reduced to mere informants simply answering the questions of the socilologist qua judge, thus supposedly producing a discipline as scientific as chemistry or physics. Without this strong obligation to play the legislating role, sociologists would not have limited the first obvious source of uncertainty, cutting all the links with the explicit and reflexive labor of the actors' own methods.

Here Latour goes on to contrast sociology's "first source of uncertainty" with the approach of anthropology, which did not suffer from this mistake as

Anthropologists, who had to deal with pre-moderns and were not requested as much to imitate natural sciences [I'd disagree with that, but that's another matter], were more fortunate and allowed their actors to deploy a much richer world. In many ways, ANT is simply an attempt to allow the members of contemporary society to have as much leeway in defining themselves as that offered by ethnographers.

Latour then explicitly connects this sentiment to his work in We Have Never, asserting that, "If, as I claim, 'we have never been modern,' sociology could finally become as good as anthropology."

In We Have Never, Latour sets up what he sees as society's tripartition of networks into "facts, power and discourse" which he believes anthropology has successfully negotiated and rightly sees as interconnected, a feat he wishes for ACT. He begins by asserting (on page 7) that

Either the networks my colleagues in science studies and I have traced do not really exist, and the critics are quite right to marginalize them or segment them into three distinct sets: facts, power and discourse; or the networks are as we have described them, and they do cross the borders of the great fiefdoms of criticism: even though they are real, and collective, and discursive.

Rather than taking an approach of naturalization, socialization, or deconstruction, ANT sees networks as being all three: "Is it our fault," Latour asks,"if the networks are simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society?" (ibid).

Latour then credits anthropology with having offered a way through the crisis of the tripartation:

This would be a hopeless dilemma had anthropology not accustomed us to dealing calmly and straightforwardly with the seamless fabric of what I shall call 'nature-culture,' since it is a bit more and a bit less than a culture.... Once she has been sent into the field, even the most rationalist ethnographer is perfectly capable of bringing together in a single monograph the myths, ethnosciences, genealogies, political forms, techniques, religions, epics and rites of the people she is studying. Send her off to study the Arapesh or the Achuar, the Koreans or the Chinese, and you will get a single narrative that weaves together the way people regard the heavens and their ancestors, the way they build houses and the way they grow yams or manioc or rice, the way they construct their government and their cosmology. In works produced by anthropologists abroad, you will not find a single trait that is not simultaneously real, social and narrated.

If the analyst is subtle, she will retrace networks that look exactly like the sociotechnical imbroglios that we outline when we pursue microbes, missiles or fuel cells in our own Western societies. We too are afraid that the sky is falling. We too associate the tiny gesture of releasing an aerosol spray with taboos pertaining to the heavens. We too have to take laws, power and morality into account in order to understand what our sciences are telling us about the chemistry of the upper atmosphere.

Yes, but we are not savages; no anthropologist studies us that way, and it is impossible to do with our own culture—or should I say nature-culture?—what can be done elsewhere, with others. Why? Because we are modern. Our fabric is no longer seamless. Analytic continuity has become impossible. For traditional anthropologists, there is not, there cannot be, there should not—an anthropology of the modern world... The ethnosciences can be connected in part to society and to discourse...;science cannot. It is even because they remain incapable of studying themselves in this way that ethnographers are so critical, and so distant, when they go off to the tropics to study others. The critical tripartition protects them because it authorizes them to reestablish continuity among the communities of the premoderns. It is only because they separate at home that ethnographers make so bold as to unify abroad.

Latour goes on to make the move that in order to do such an ethnography of the modern world, the word "modern" itself has to be renegotiated (hence the title of the work). I'll save all of that for next week--I just wanted to bring in the part of We Have Never that I see as relevant to what Latour is discussing in terms of anthropology in this part of Reassmbling.

Action and Motion and more from Ted Kennedy

2007-03-18T21:25:00.000-06:00

Perhaps I’ve developed a sort of trained incapacity where I see Kenneth Burke in everything I read, but I find it very difficult not to be reminded of Burke when I read Latour. When Latour talks about “actors” I’m recalling the distinction between action and motion that Burke has laid out, as well as his pentad as a means for understanding people’s motives or accounts of events.

This week in qualitative research methods over in the Communication Department we debated whether or not communication scholars ought to be considered scientists. I see this same discourse in Latour’s book. In class, I argued that we shouldn’t be considered scientists, nor should we want to be. For me, social sciences tend to reduce everything humans do to motion. The idea of motion seems divorced completely from that of free will, and would render all human action completely controllable and predictable. But Latour writes that when people “engage in providing controversial accounts for their actions as well as for those of others,” “traces become innumberable and no study will ever stop for lack of information on these controversies” (p. 47). This sounds to me like action. Burke too believed that human action was far more complex than social scientists might have us believe. I think it is absolutely crucial that we understand that actions require thought and motive, motion however does not. Human beings have incredibly complex reasons and purposes for acting as they do, and I feel that Latour is sufficiently appreciative of this idea.

When Latour talks about appreciating the accounts people provide for events in this world, it is hard not to think of Burke’s pentad (act, agent, agency, scene, purpose). These terms were suggested by Burke as a means for understanding the way people account for events and acts in our world. One excellent study that utilized Burke’s pentad described how when accounting for the death of his young female passenger at Chappaquiddick, Ted Kennedy privileged elements of the scene in order to minimize his own involvement or fault (here's the speech). But while Burke’s system would seem to compliment Latour’s philosophy, one must also heed Latour’s suggestion that “we have to resist the idea that there exists somewhere a dictionary where all the variegated words of the actors can be translated into the few words of the social vocabulary” (p. 48). Latour might very well object to using just five key words to explain any one individual’s account of an action. For that matter, it seems that Latour’s problem might lie more generally with the limitations put upon us by language itself.

In short, I like the way Latour appears to be privileging the perspectives of human beings. I also think he’s got something in common with Kenneth Burke. I think a lot of science attempts to impose our own perspectives and understandings on the world. Latour, with all his talk of uncertainties and controversies seems to advocate against this impulse. But this lease Latour to argue against all sorts of criticism and unfortunately, I still don’t think I’m ready to ditch the critical approach I’m so accustomed to. What if the associations we trace from people’s accounts appear to be harmful or destructive to themselves or others? Of course, there is way more at stake in a question like this than whether Ted Kennedy is a boozer and a womanizer.

Ling, D. A. (1970). A pentadic analysis of Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s Address to the people
of Massachusetts, July 25, 1969. Central States Speech Journal, 21, 81-87.

LaTour and Readability

2007-03-18T12:48:00.001-06:00

Maggie writes, "I must say my own understanding appears to come and go in various parts of the book."

I feel your pain, Maggie. On the one hand, I find LaTour's writing pretty reader friendly, given that he's A) a theory guy, and B) he's French! Usually, such a pairing makes for difficult reading, but LaTour often sounds down to earth ("If this looks like splitting hairs, well it is, but this is because the tiny difference in direction taken by the two sociologies is no larger than a hair's width" (39)), and his sometimes colloquial style is definitely reassuring--no real struggling to make sense out of long, twisting, convoluted sentences as in Derrida or Foucault.

Which reminds me. There's this Lydia Davis short story, "Foucualt and Pencil," where Davis, who is also a translator of French (she has a new translation of Proust's In Search of Lost Time which is supposed to be pretty good), pokes fun at the experience of reading Foucault:

"Short sentences easier to understand than long ones. Certain long ones understandable part by part, but so long, forgot beginning before reaching end. Went back to beginning, understood beginning, read on, and again forgot beginning before reaching end. Read on without going back and without understanding, without remembering, and without learning, pencil idle in hand. Came to sentence that was clear, made pencil mark in margin. Mark indicated understanding, indicated forward progress in book."

I thought some might enjoy the levity there! Plus, we're supposed to be looking for webs of meaning, and this whole discussion of LaTour and the readability of theory in general traced an association, in my mind, to the Davis story. Okay, back to the program...

On the other hand, I do find the LaTour rough going in that, as with most theory, I still find that I understand things at the surface level much more than at the detail level. Yes, LaTour's surface is friendlier and easier to read. There's little of the, as Davis pokes fun at, having to consistently go "back to beginning," but I still have that sort of "Okay, I understand the gist here, but could I really put this into practice?" feeling. I'm still making my way through Part I, however, and I assume that the book takes the reader through some more specific examples or case studies before it ends.

Overall, though, I find the LaTour reading much less ominous that I had feared (or that I had felt after reading his introduction weeks back).

Help with LaTour

2007-03-18T12:40:00.000-06:00

If anyone's having difficulty making it through the first hundred or so pages of LaTour, you might want to skip to the section On the Difficulty of Being an Ant, where LaTour imagines a conversation between himself and a PhD student trying to understand ANT. I found it much easier to understand than the preceding sections. ANT's ideas seem to be most clearly expressed in the form of debate or conversation. Also, this section makes apparent the problems of ANT – that it's not really a theory and everybody (namely, thesis advisors) want a theory.

I could certainly see the influence of LaTour's ideas about social science in the methods textbooks I read to prepare for my thesis. His ideas of letting the actors speak for themselves become particularly relevant in ethnographic writing studies, where a teacher-researcher finds it much easier to be relevant by arguing “what's wrong” with student writing rather than understanding the students on their own terms. I liked his emphasis on writing and his appreciation of complexity – I think that the effort not to reach a resolution has gained a lot of ground in the field too. I wondered how he might feel about the use of academic discourse as a whole, not just that of social scientists, and the merit of teaching students to enter discourse communities. As with the halfway point of the Berlin book, I am interested to see if he'll attempt examples of what he's advocating for.

Oh what a tangled web we weave,

2007-03-18T12:34:00.001-06:00

I am impressed with Chad’s obvious understanding of ANT. I must say my own understanding appears to come and go in various parts of the book.

On page 22 LaTour gives five uncertainties: the nature of groups, the nature of actions, the nature of objects, the nature of facts, and the the type of studies done under the laboe of a science of the social. This is one of those things that actually makes sense to me, however, I’m unsure of how it is more salient when combined with ANT than when discussed under the term “sociology.” It is because there are such uncertainties within groupings of the populace that “social sciences” came into being, is it not? I probably misunderstood something.

Latour states,”The task of defining and ordering the social should be left to the actors themselves, not taken up by the analyst. This is why to regain some sense of order, the best solution is to trace connections between the controversies themselves rather than try to decide how to settle any given controversy” (23). I believe this to be very true, but then when I began to think about it I began to wonder which analyst had taken up what controversies to settle. I really can’t think of an example, which is my point, and I wondered if one of you braniacs out there could give me one.

He also states, “To use the word ‘actor’ means that it’s never clear who and what is acting when we act since an actor on stage is never alone in acting” (46). Some of me understands this, and parts of me don’t. (The left hand and the right big toe are the dissenters). Anyway, what I would like to know is if me means an individual does not know when he or she is acting of their own accord. Is everything we do a reaction to something or someone else? On the one hand I can buy that, but on the other I wonder if this is the case, is there ultimately the singular self? But then, perhaps that is the question at hand.

When talking about “The Third Source of Uncertainty” LaTour explains that objects can be actors, too. He describes this as an association between entities which are in no way recognizable as being social in the ordinary manner, except during the brief moment when they are reshuffled together” (65). These items have something social through the modifications made throughout the whole place in the organization of all the goods. These minute shifts reveal to the observer which new combinations are explored and which paths will be taken (65). I liked this example in that it made the term “network” very clear to me. It also made me wonder how in the world anyone would be able to trace a “complete” network of anything. It would wind up being an extraordinarily vast project.

Ah, well.

Map, Essay, References

2007-03-17T14:29:00.000-06:00

I have no good reason for why I didn't post this until now. But feedback is definitely welcome. It'll be called something like "Fantasy Theme Analysis and Invention as a Social Act." Maybe.

----------------------------

Symbolic convergence theory suggests that people come to share consciousness about their worlds by sharing symbolic material such as stories, jokes, analogies, etc. Shared meanings give a group its purpose and identity thereby allowing them to reach consensus and achieve true unity. In short, symbolic convergence allows people to share worldviews. Ernest Bormann first noticed and explicated the phenomena while examining small group communication but quickly expanded the theory to apply to rhetorical criticism. Bormann’s colleagues Donald Shields and John Cragan also made careers out of applying and expanding the concept. Scholarly research has demonstrated that fantasy-theme analysis, which is the primary means for studying symbolic convergence theory, is particularly useful for examining how group members communicate with each other and with those that they are trying to persuade.

Joshua Gunn is perhaps the most vocal opponents of symbolic convergence theory and fantasy theme analysis. He’s gone back and forth with Bormann and Bormann’s colleague’s on the pages of the Quarterly Journal of Speech about the merits and inadequacies of this particular communication theory. One of the aspects of the theory that is most often is disputed is the degree to which people actually share dramatized narratives (fantasies) and “chain” their ideas and experiences among one another. Some have gone so far as to question whether the existing examples of fantasy theme analysis are truly indicators of collective action, or just evidence of the work of a few individuals. These objections seriously question the integrity of symbolic convergence theory, which I believe still has plenty of potential for explaining human interaction. Therefore, I’d like to rescue the theory from its detractors.

In my paper I will strengthen symbolic convergence theory by introducing the idea of rhetorical invention, which ought to be familiar to any and all serious rhetoricians. Karen LeFevre has argued that invention is a social act. Writers such as George Herbert Mead and Emile Durkheim have suggested that all rhetorical invention is a result of social processes. Therefore, a theory of (social) invention can expand the way scholars think about symbolic convergence. Symbolic convergence happens in places other than just small groups. Anytime people share ideas, or ideas can be demonstrated to permeate the consciousness of a particular group of thinkers, I would argue that symbolic convergence has occurred. Definitions of symbolic convergence need to be expanded in order to accommodate important theories of rhetorical invention. Some types of convergence are perhaps less direct than what was originally posited, but they are nonetheless forms of convergence.

In conclusion, symbolic convergence theory was once an exciting new idea in communication and rhetorical studies. However, serious criticisms of its validity have injured the theory’s reputation. There is absolutely no doubt that fantasy theme analysis has fallen out of favor with communication scholars and rhetorical critics. These ideas are not used or published as often as they once were. However, an understanding of invention as a social act can significantly bolster a symbolic convergence theory by understanding the way the social is responsible for the creation of all knowledge and therefore all symbolic material. This can free up the theory and the primary means for studying the theory (fantasy theme analysis) for use once again.

Preliminary Bibliography

Benoit, W. L., Klyukovski, A. A., McHale, J. P., & Airne, D. (2001). A fantasy-theme analysis
of political cartoons on the Clinton-Lewinsky-Starr affair. Critical Studies in Media
Communication, 18(4), 377-394.

Bormann, E. G., Cragan, J. F., & Shields, D. C. (2003). Defending symbolic convergence theory
from an imaginary Gunn. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 89(4), 366-372.

Bormann, G., Knutson, R. (2002). Why do people share fantasies? An empirical investigation of
a basic tenet of the symbolic. Communication Studies, 48(3), 254-276.

Bormann, E. G., Cragan, J. F., & Shields, D. C. (1996). An expansion of the rhetorical vision
component of the symbolic convergence theory: The cold war paradigm case.
Communication Monographs, 63, 1-28.

Bormann, E., Cragan, J., & Shields, D. (1994). In defense of symbolic convergence theory: A
look at the theory and its criticisms after two decades. Communication Theory, 4, 259-
294.

Bormann, E. G. (1985a). The force of fantasy: Restoring the American dream. Illinois:

Southern Illinois University Press.

Bormann, E. (1985). Symbolic convergence Theory: A communication formulation. Journal of
Communication, 35(4), 128-138.

Bormann, E. G. (1982). Fantasy and rhetorical vision: Ten years later. Quarterly Journal of
Speech, 68, 288-305.

Buber, M. (1970). I and thou. New York, NY: Charles Scribners’ Sons.

Durkheim, E. (1954). The elementary forms of religious life. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Durkheim, E. (1966). The rules of sociological method. New York, NY: The Free Press.

Fisher, Walter R. (1984) Narration as human communication paradigm: The case of public
moral argument. Communication Monographs, 51(1), 1-22.

Foss, K. & Littejohn, W. (1986). The day after: Rhetorical vision in an ironic frame. Critical
Studies in Mass Communication, 3, 317-336.

Gunn, J. (2003a). Refiguring fantasy: Imagination and its decline in U.S. rhetorical studies.
Quarterly Journal of Speech, 89(1), 41-59.

Gunn, J. (2003b). Response. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 89(4), 373-373.

Knuepper, C. & Anderson, F. (1980). Uniting wisdom and eloquence: the need for rhetorical
invention. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 66(3), 313-326.

Larson, R. (1972). Some techniques for teaching rhetorical invention. Speech Teacher, 21(3),
303-309.

LeFevre, K. (1987). Invention as a social act. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Mead, G. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Putnam, L., Van Hoeven, S., Bullis, C. (1991). The role of rituals and fantasy themes in teachers’
bargaining. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 55, 85-103.

St.Antoine, T. J., Althouse, M. T., & Ball, M. A. (2005). Fantasy-theme criticism. In J. A.
Kuypers (Ed.), The art of rhetorical criticism. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

ANT against itself

2007-03-16T14:19:00.000-06:00

I wanted to contextualize the Latour reading for this week with some basic facts about actor-network theory (ANT), maybe selfishly :), since you guys should not feel obligated to read a giant blog post about it. These definitions draw on Latour's remarks in the intro and first part, and also add those of ANT's other founders and scholars. Our discussion of the social in Latour got me interested in ANT, the theory for which the book is meant to serve as an introduction. My discussion of his part 1 on Monday night may draw on some of the same material I'm offering here, so apologies for any repetition.

The most basic fact about ANT is that it doesn't exist, according to Latour's essay, "On recalling ANT." He problematizes it systematically, showing why it's not a theory, why the uses of the terms "actor" and "network" are inaccurate, and even why the hyphen between them doesn't make sense. The proper term, as he has insisted over the years, is "actant rhizome ontology," and he actually says, in the essay, that ANT has stayed in currency, as a term, because it sounds better than ARO.

Since we're reading an introduction to ANT, written by him almost a decade after that essay, the term clearly shows something of a comfortable fit, but Latour's ambiguity points back to one of the basic aspects of ANT, in the little that I've read: the documents tend to marvellously imitate the networks that they describe, reversing their conclusions, striving for complexity. The most consistent conclusion in the essay mirrors the one in the part of "Reassembling the Social" that we're reading for Monday: ANT functions, not as a theory, but as an ontology, or way of describing being, that critiques traditional notions of the social.

John Law, the other key figure in ANT (according to Jeff Rice), offers similar
caveats about ANT: it can't be essentialized, since complexity is one of its key features; it can't really be seen as a theory, since that would imply some fixed idea that might take away from its emphasis on fluidity; and it should not exist, as a term, but does for the sake of convenience. Again, this approach to ANT really metarhetoricizes the ANT conception of the network: it doesn't hold a consistent reality, and any motion toward a stable idea is a convenience.

As in Latour's essay, though, Law offers a couple of key features of ANT. First, it emphasizes "relational materiality." This means a couple of things, from what I can gather. First, these guys draw on Foucault's idea that relationality, the idea that we're defined by each othher, applies to much more than just language. In ANT terms, this extends further--they see the networks that we live in being defined by things other than language, but also other than individuals. Second, ANT emphasizes "performativity." That means that relationality is defined by performance--there is no static network of connections that we exist in; the network is performed. Law, and other ANT theorists, don't see the individual as a fixed site of social construction, but as something much more dynamic.

Aside from Foucault, the thinkers who seem to have clearly influenced ANT are DeLeuze and Guattari. Their ideas about social structure have given rise to ANT's conception of the network, and to the "actant-rhizome" idea. That idea basically says that society can be seen in two ways: as arboreal, meaning hierarchical and beaureaucratic; or as rhizomatic, meaning indeterminate, acentric, and dynamic. Latour's references to them show his continuing sense of debt.

If ANT is perplexing at all to you, as it has been to me in reading "Reassembling the Social," it may help a tad to know that that perplexity is part of its mission. It doesn't so much offer a set of tidy ideas as do the postmodern thang of problematizing long-standing ones, and offering hints of revolutionary alternative. ANT's influence seems to have been pretty intense in the quarter century that it's existed, possibly mostly in sociology, and in contributing to our understanding of networks. However, Latour stresses the difference between ANT's sense of network and the computer network that has so informed popular understanding. The network that they talk about is transformative, dynamic, fluid, and holds none of the illusion of fixity commonly ascribed to the virtual world.

My understanding of ANT is definitely teeny, and please feel free to chime in, add, or correct any bogus info above.

Neocon definition redux

2007-03-15T19:10:00.000-06:00

http://www.slate.com/id/2161800?nav=tap3

Seeking Agora in the Heartland: A Case Example

2007-03-14T12:03:00.000-06:00

Hi,

As I mentioned in class Monday night, having just driven through the following scenes with Crowley’s book and a gallon of coffee at my side, I decided to make the following collation one of my blog entries this week. I’m not trying to win the Russell Award for posting early and posting often (if that in-joke still plays), but I realized that much of what follows has a short web-life. That is, I was going to keep this brief and tidy by linking us to these passages, but some have already disappeared and, perishable as news is, I believe the article I conclude with will not be available by the weekend. Mea culpa in advance for the length of this entry.

Though each of the following restates the story line, I’ll mention that Soulforce Equality Ride made Springfield’s Central Bible College a stop on their nationwide tour. I’m not interested in presenting all of this to stress how pro-gay rights I am in a week when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has made it pretty clear he isn’t. I don’t even like the language of “pro-” discourse as my white liberal guilt often arises as self-consciousness (ie. “Hey all my gay friends, I am so“pro-” you and your rights!”). I am interested in offering a case example (something we asked of Crowley) of how the divide in civil/civic discourse is partly temporal and results from a lack of postmodern agora—-places to stand that are both “inside” (inevitably) and “outside” (idealistically) the already colonized space of participants in a discourse (or, I suppose, “armed combatants in the eminent war of words”).

I’ve tried to offer a counter-balance of optimism (something else we asked of Crowley) by culling mention of other denominations, blogs from the “Equality bus,” and a newspaper passage about another Soulforce “event” where, seemingly, more productive civil discourse was achieved-—due partly to an agreement to share space (i.e. at Dordt College in what is listed as “Sioux Center,” Iowa, perhaps as a typographical conflation of Sioux City and a campus “Sioux Center.” Either way, I like the accidental emergence of “center” in this context).

In reprinting what follows, I’m don’t want to denigrate or simply “pick on” a place, its faculty, or people I know due to the decisions of its administrators, mission statements, policy rhetoric, etc. (Homosexuality is made coequal to gambling and drinking on pg. 3B; two days later it is equated to the “immorality of adultery” on pg. 1A). Instead, I’m interested in how both groups engage in a territorial rhetoric reminiscent of what we were reducing to absurdity in Crowley (i.e. “The Christians are coming! To arms, fellow liberals! Man the gates!”). I freely admit I’m on the Soulforce “side” yet question the approach of both sides in negotiating public and private space before any “densely articulated ideologies” can be leveraged.

From the CBC homepage, a well-publicized memo from Jim P. Vigil, Vice President for Student Development:

“Central Bible College is making preparations for a possible protest outside its campus, located at 3000 N Grant Ave., by members of the Soulforce Equality Ride. Despite this, the College will still hold a regular day of classes on March 12.
“In the fall of 2006, a representative of the Soulforce Equality Ride contacted Central Bible College to inform the College about the group’s bus tour schedule and their intention to hold a series of events on our campus.

“The Central Bible College reviewed the Soulforce Equality Ride information, their event plans, their materials from their web site and reports from 19 institutions who were confronted during last year’s Equality Ride tour. Last year during their first Equality Ride tour this group made stops at 19 campuses in which there were a total of ninety-nine arrests. This group has contacted Springfield Police Department notifying them of inevitable arrests on that day.

“After this review, Central Bible College decided to decline the request and the Equality Ride organization was informed of this decision. Central Bible College does not intend to allow these individuals to come onto our campus and offer the legitimacy of any kind of official forum. Despite the verbal and written decline, members of the Equality Ride still intend to visit Central Bible College on March 12.”

*I’ll only highlight “making preparations for a possible protest,” “19 institutions who were confronted,” and, of course, “the legitimacy of any kind of official forum.” I guess I’d also marvel at the irony of his surname being “Vigil.”

Consider, too, the shorter version as dispatched in an in-house email from CBC security and later leaked to the web. Note the ideological impasse delicately implied by “we would not change what we thought about the matter and we are not interested in a dialogue with them.”

From an in-house CBC security email:

“A group known as soulforce is coming to CBC on March 12, 2007. They sent a letter to the President expressing a desire to dialogue with our students about being Gay Christians. They do not like our CBC's statement on the homosexual lifestyle and want us to accept them as fellow Christians.

“They were sent a letter informing them that we would not change what we thought about the matter and we are not interested in a dialogue with them.

“They are coming any way and called the Chief of Police and told them they were coming and expected to be arrested.”

Consider, then, the only related blog entries I could find on the Soulforce website:

From Amy Brainer-Medillin, one of 52 Soulforce “equality riders,” blogging from the bus last week as it leaves stops in Madison and Milwaukee:

“For me personally, these two days in Madison and Milwaukee have served as a period of both rejuvenation and reflection. I recall the apathy we encountered at Notre Dame and ask myself whether prejudice is better served by hostility or by passivity – by a physical or verbal attack, for example, or by invisibility and silence. Can inaction be violent? After Notre Dame, I believe that it can – indeed, that the choice NOT to act, speak, welcome, listen, hear, think, reflect, question – is often the most violent and damaging choice of all. The absence of space is a psychological barbed wire fence, as limiting to the human spirit as any prison.

* * * *

“May questions and conversations like these multiply across and beyond the campus. May the students who spoke out so courageously call on that transformative sense of self as they use their bodies and voices to create space where none is granted.”

* * * *

From the same blog written this week as the writer, Abigail Reikow, left my hometown. (Please note that while the local media didn’t report it, a “common space” was offered by the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Springfield):

“It has only been over a week since we began and I already miss my family. That feeling of loss, however, was rectified today when the Equality Riders arrived at the First Unitarian Universalist Church here in Springfield, Missouri. We were welcomed to their congregation this morning, greeted with smiles and affirmed with a service titled “The Inherent Worth & Dignity of Me.” Together we sang, shared stories, and were even the privileged audience of a poetry reading from one of the congregation’s members. While my family rests miles away, it is comforting to know that family I had never met rests within pocketed communities that punctuate the plains of the Midwest.

“We were provided lunch following the service, including two vegan dishes to accommodate the dietary needs of certain riders, an effort that required certain members to stay awake half the night when they had realized that they had forgotten certain ingredients. A small detail it seems, but is helps to illuminate the way in which we were welcomed and embraced today during our visit. As we laughed about it over lunch, I looked around and realized how long it has been since I have been in a church that felt like home. I have spent half my life as a member of numerous congregations but always feeling like an outcast, even as a heterosexual. At twenty-two years old I am, after today, reconsidering my stances on serving as a member of a spiritual congregation.

“We returned to the church later this evening for a candle light vigil that Equality Riders opened in a singing of “Amazing Grace.” Our directors led a discussion concerning relentless non-violence and civil disobedience for those members who demonstrated interested in visiting Central Bible College with us tomorrow morning. This congregation, in realizing the lack of welcome we may possible face, will send some of its own members to stand beside us tomorrow outside school parameters. To emphasize our mission, philosophy, and the necessity of this movement, the directors revisited the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King by reading passages from “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” I turned around in my pew to witness the movement of spiritual energy that fluctuated throughout the room, finding comfort in the expression of a common conviction: truth is found in movement and transformation requires tension.”

**OK, so for Faith this example offers positive news from the Land of Lakes, for Maggie the continuing impact and affect of “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” for Chad an echo of the key question as to how discourse is “better served by hostility or by passivity,” for David a mention of yet another Christian denomination whose tenets I can’t explain, for Mark an example of discourse within the worship space of a congregation, a la your great Ted Kennedy example, for Court I deleted the gross misreading of Habermas at the end of the CBC security memo, for Aaron “Amazing Grace,” which I have the Man in Black singing somewhere, and for Donna, beyond the Madison reference and the power of blogs, a Massumi-lite reference in the final statement: “truth is found in movement and transformation requires tension.”

* * * *

I’ll conclude with a sample of the rhetoric from the purportedly objective staff writers at the local newspaper:

Anonymous staff writer for The Springfield News-Leader:

- Monday -- The approximately 30 Soulforce riders, as well as local supporters, will meet at 10:30 a.m. in front of Central Bible College, on the sidewalk on the north side of Norton Road, about one and a half blocks east of Grant Avenue. Following a brief news conference, some of the group members will step onto campus and risk arrest. The rest of the group will continue to stand off campus until at least noon. They will then move to Panera Bread, 2535 N. Kansas Expressway, at 2 p.m., where students are invited to talk with them.

(So, Faith, you can add Panera Bread to your list of postmodern agora, right after MySpace, Facebook, some blogs, and the Speaker’s Circle.)

And finally. . .

Linda Leicht, news and feature writer for the Springfield News-Leader:

Headline: Gay-rights group plans Monday visit to CBC:
But the college won't allow them onto school grounds, citing group's methods.

"About 30 Soulforce Equality riders will arrive Monday at Central Bible College hoping to have a "conversation" about the school's position on homosexuality.
They will more than likely be arrested, said one of the group's leaders

"They're so fearful of the issue of homosexuality that even one of us coming on the campus ... for a respectful dialogue" is unacceptable, said Curtis Peterson, 22, of New York.

"Ron Bradley, campus pastor, said the Assemblies of God Bible college is not taking an "antagonistic posture" toward the group, but they are not welcome on campus.
"We have no difficulty discussing this issue (of homosexuality)," said Bradley. Instead, it is the organization and its method that led to the decision, he said. "Their track record has been ignoble at best."

* * * *

"Soulforce is an organization started by the Rev. Mel White, who worked for evangelical Christians — including the Rev. Jerry Fallwell — before coming out as a gay man. Its mission: "... Freedom for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from religious and political oppression through the practice of relentless nonviolent resistance."

"The first Soulforce Equality Ride was held in 2005. This year, the ride includes two buses, with about 30 riders on each, that will visit 32 schools around the country, including Baylor University, Bob Jones University, Brigham Young University and Central Bible College. The schools were selected because they are perceived as having policies that are homophobic.

"Bradley rejects that description of CBC. Homosexual activity, along with behavior such as drunkenness, adultery or theft — "any sort of behavior that is not Scripturally endorsed" — is subject to disciplinary action, he said.
But discussion of issues of sexuality is not off-limits at the school, Bradley said. "You have to," he said. "That's part of life."

"The school does not want the Soulforce riders to lead that conversation, however.
"Our concern, having studied their patterns," said Bradley, "is while their initial contact calls for dialogue, their pattern has been much more combative and on some campuses, deceptive."

* * * *

"Some will step onto campus, said Peterson, who has twice been arrested for trespassing during Soulforce activities. He explained that the action is "civil disobedience" as used during the civil rights movement.
Peterson, a gay man and the son of a Baptist preacher, has been in contact with Springfield police and is aware that they have been called by the college to keep the riders from coming onto college property.

"We go out of our way to be in contact with the police," he said. "We are not violent, and we always submit to arrest."

* * * *

"Not every college has refused to admit the Soulforce riders. Last week, the group visited the campus of Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa, for what one pastor described as "the biggest day of spiritual growth that campus went through all year."

"Although the school, affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church, originally declined to have the group on campus, when administrators realized that the visit would take place regardless, they decided to welcome the riders.

"We made the choice that it would be a more effective Christian witness to interact with them on campus," said Ken Boersma, vice president of student services.
The college provided faculty, staff and students who served as hosts for each individual rider as they accompanied them on campus for a day of planned activities.

"We decided to share our Christian commitment in a way of being gracious to them," Boersma said.

"The school presented its own position — that sexual activity outside of marriage, including sex with someone of the same gender, is grounds for dismissal — during a panel discussion attended by students and invited guests.

"The Rev. Aaron Baart, who pastors a church in the community, was among the panelists representing the school's position. He said he expected anger and deep emotion but discovered that the students, faculty and the Soulforce riders were all "very respectful."

"Following the campus activities, Baart invited the students and riders to continue the dialogue. "It is a reality in our culture," he said. "They have to learn how to dialogue on it in a constructive and respectful manner."

"Baart was pleased with the university's response. "I think Dordt did a great job," he said.

"Not everybody in the community was as welcoming. Three men in pickup trucks harassed the group at their hotel and defaced their bus by writing insults and obscenities.

"But that, too, offered the school an opportunity for Christian witness, Boersma said. In addition to the college issuing a public apology on behalf of the community, Dordt students washed the bus."

* * * *

So there's some broader coverage that suggests not all Christians, fundamentalist or otherwise (and I belong to none of these churches), are essentialist or hard-wired into the apocalypto-network. Likewise, not all of the Soulforce members are ipod-toting Abbie Hoffmans hellbent on getting arrested in each town (though, potentially, some may be). Here, too, is some glimmer of a successful space located within the supposed “opposition’s” territory.

Well, let me vow to never go on at this length again. I’m sorry if I wore out the Down Arrow on anyone’s keyboard.

Read you soon,

Kevin

* * *

Abstract and WC...

2007-03-13T19:32:00.000-06:00

Hey guys and gals--I passed this out last night, sans works cited. I still can't get the Cmap to post, so if anyone has insight into that process, well, great.
*****************************

Lefevre, in the chapter from Invention as a Social Act where she deals with implications, brings up issues for the general classroom that become more salient if writing is to be considered more social. My research question regarding these classroom practices is, in general, what does the writing classroom look like if we choose to utilize her line of thinking? More specifically, what happens to composition as a discipline if we begin to consider writing and the teaching of writing as more of a social act, rather than the banking method?
I’m seeing several paths that seem to diverge from this line of thinking. One reaction is directly (to me at least) connected to the catchphrase that I’m seeing in the educational literature (Bain, Light) that we should, as educators, “meet them (students) where they are” and then scaffold them closer to where we would like them. If we are meeting writing students, particularly in first year courses, where they are, then (again, to me) Cultural Studies seems to be one of the places to go. I believe this is where Berlin goes as well, in chapters six and seven of R, P, &C. his mediums, that is, including radio, television, and film, rather than staying within written texts, seem to be connected. While his aims have seemed to high, the content, I think, is very justifiable, particularly given the research work going on in higher education.
The other path(s) that I see in connection with Lefevre’s ideas are the WAC and WID concepts. If we don’t buy the idea of cultural studies, (or even if we do) then the students’ needs must be addressed in their content areas. The social nature still remains, as does the writing, but within and across disciplines, which, again, comes up in the educational literature concerning student success. (Suy, others)
After tackling these ideas, my primary goal is a picture of the “social pedagogies” that would enliven a freshmen writing course. My goal here is to deal with the implications that Lefevre raises, and actually design the course that both maximizes the “sociality” of invention and writing instruction, as well as minimizes the issues that this design inherently brings with it—authorship issues, evaluation, etc.
I hope to be able to take these three ideas and somehow meld them into a useful shape—the shape of a freshmen writing course, complete with syllabus and general assignments, much the way Berlin presents his courses in R, P, & C.

Bain, K. What the best college teachers do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2004
Bazerman, Charles & Russell, David R. Landmark Essays on Writing Across the Curriculum. Davis: Hermagoras Press. 1994.
Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 2001.
Berlin, James A. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures. West Lafayette: Parlor Press. 2003.
Hayakawa, S.I. Langiuage in Thought and Action.—other info coming soon.
LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1987.
Light, R. J. Making the most of college: Students speak their minds. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press. 2001.
McKeachie, W. J., & Svinicki, M. (Eds.) McKeachie’s teaching tips (12th ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 2006
McLeod, Susan H., Erica Miraglia, Margot Soven, Christopher Thaiss (Eds.) WAC for the New Millennium. Urbana: NCTE. 2001.
Salzmann, Zdenek. Language, Culture and Society: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology.—other info coming soon
Villanueva, Victor. (Ed.) Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. Urbana: NCTE. 2003

Bruno and Edith: Abstract and Bibliography

2007-03-13T06:14:00.000-06:00

Hi,

I only had a copy of the following abstract for Dr. Strickland last night, though I did distribute my colorful if tiny CMAP, which I have attempted to include above. Also, Dr. S., I may have clipped the version 1.2 bibliography to my abstract and what follows is version 1.3 (a few more sources added).

* * * *

Agency within the “Silent Organization”:
Reassembling a Rhetoric of the Social in Wharton’s Age of Innocence.

Although it is commonplace to associate Edith Wharton with a literature of the social, critics have disagreed sharply as to how resolution in Wharton’s narratives either reinforces a deterministic naturalism or provides a rich critique of the “complex web of social forces” commonly ascribed to late naturalism. As early, defining critics of Wharton’s work, R.W.B. Lewis, Blake Nevius and Margaret B. McDowell each explicated The Age of Innocence (1920) to suggest that Newland Archer, as a surrogate for Wharton, can only glimpse “hieroglyphics” of the social and is too much a product of its “old decencies” to articulate an escape from—or destination outside—the hidebound New York of Wharton’s youth. Likewise, Donald Pizer, in his famous case for The Age of Innocence as a work of “perfected naturalism,” argues that Wharton’s novel “demonstrates the constraining power [of the social] over individual desire and destiny” (162).(1) Feminist critics (Showalter, 1985; Goodman, 1990; Erlich, 1992) have attempted to account for Wharton’s reification of the social as a result of Wharton’s attempts to engage and transcend—more Ellen Olenska than Newland Archer—the dominant male literary traditions, most notably the influence of her friend Henry James, in her effort to articulate “the social” as a construct and not an inescapable determinant of identity or gender.

I would argue that Wharton employs a rhetoric of the social to resolve in her fiction the struggle over agency and “fixity” we may observe in her letters, autobiography, and later criticism, especially French Ways and Their Meaning (1919) and The Writing of Fiction (1925), which bookend the writing of Age of Innocence. The recent work of Bruno Latour, particularly his view of actor-network-theory and how we assemble, disassemble and reconstruct the social, can illuminate ways in which Wharton offers agency to characters and objects that embody “the social” beyond symbolic projection. Without recasting Wharton as a proleptic ANT theorist, I will explore her attempts to move past an acceptance of the social as a unified force accountable for material consequences in terms of how Latour accounts for this history of an error in his sociology of the social. Wharton, as her letters and criticism reveal, was more interested in "tracing associations" that merely reproducing the social hieroglyphics, or the "silent organization" sans translation or analysis. Although Latour, ANT theorists, and some social-epistemic rhetoricians use literary language to describe networks outside the literary (primarily networks of science and technology), I am also proposing that actor-network-theory is well-suited for troubling the begged premise of the social in American literary naturalism and that Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, as one inheritor of the naturalist gaze, is well-suited for testing key assumptions of actor-network theory.

To provide context and exigency, I will draw on what I’ve termed “the establishment of the social” in the Wharton scholarship above. I will also focus on articles by Hoestaker (2005) and Luckhurst (2006) who have linked Latour to semiotic analysis and “scientifiction.” Additionally, I will respond to Singley’s appropriation of Bourdieu’s habitus (2003) as one means of articulating how “Wharton embraces fluid rather than fixed notions of culture in her fiction and life” (495). Finally, I will develop this “Latourian analysis” in dialogue with related poststructural influences (Jameson, 1981, 1992; Baudrillard, 1977), social-epistemic rhetoric (LeFevre, 1987; Berlin 1996), and social constructionist scholarship in American literary history (Budd, 1995; Grenier, 1993; Kaplan, 1988). To convey some of this dialogue, I have mapped a network of associations on the diagram I distributed (see above).

_______________________

(1) Pizer’s rhetoric, though foundational to the study of American literary naturalism, seems guilty of treating the social, as Latour suggests, “to be always already there” at Wharton’s disposal (Latour 8). This is clearest when Pizer asserts that “though it seldom expresses itself either in open prohibition or direct punishment in The Age of Innocence—the world that Archer describes as a “silent organization” of habit, custom, and assumption—exerts a web of compulsion that powerfully shapes and controls individual belief and behavior in the most vital areas of human experience” (Pizer 164).

Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulations (The Body, In Theory; Histories of Cultural Materialism). Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 1995.

Bell, Millicent. Edith Wharton and Henry James. New York, George Braziller, Inc., 1965.

Berlin, James A. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Reconfiguring College English Studies. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor P., 2003.

Budd, Louis J. “The American Background.” The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London. Ed. Donald Pizer. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969 1950).

Erlich, Gloria C. The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.

Goodman, Susan. Edith Wharton: Friends & Rivals. Hanover, NH: Hanover UP of New England, 1990.

Grenier, Richard. “Society and Edith Wharton.” Commentary. 96.6 (1993): 48-53. A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. Ed. Carol Singley. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.

Hostaker, Roar. “Latour—Semiotics and Science Studies.” Science Studies. 18.2 (2005): 5-25.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

---. Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago P., 1988.

Kellogg, Grace. The Two Lives of Edith Wharton: The Woman and Her Work. New York: Appleton-Century P, 1965.

Knights, Pamela. “Forms of Disembodiment: The Social Subject in The Age of Innocence.” The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. 20-46.

Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network- Theory. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.

---. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Boston: Harvard UP, 2006.

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Ill. UP, 1987.

Lewis, R.W.B. Introduction. The Age of Innocence. Edith Wharton. Critical Edition. New York: Scribner’s, 1968: pp. xii-xiii.

---. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Long, Lisa A. “Genre Matters: Embodying American Literary Naturalism.” American Literary History 19.1 (2007): 160-173.

Luckhurst, Roger. “Bruno Latour’s Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages, and Tangled Objects." Science Fiction Studies. 33.1 (2006): 4-17.

Martin, Robert K. “Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Nathanial Hawthorne.” Henry James Review 21.1 (2000): 56-62.

McDowell, Margaret B. “Newland Archer’s Limited Views.” Edith Wharton. Boston: Twayne Pub., 1976.

Nevius, Blake. “The Low Rich Murmur of the Past.” Edith Wharton: Studies of Her Fiction. U of California P., 1953.

Nowlin, Michael. “Edith Wharton’s Higher Provincialism: French Ways for Americans and the Ends of The Age of Innocence.” Journal of American Studies. 38.1 (2004): 89-108.

Pizer, Donald. The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993.

Sand, Andrea J. “Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.” Explicator. 62.1 (2003): 23-25.

Singley, Carol. “Bourdieu, Wharton and Changing Culture in The Age Of Innocence.” Cultural Studies. 17 (2003): 495-520.

Showalter, “The Death of a Lady (Novelist)” 1985 (still locating*).

Thomas, J.D. “Tribal Culture, Pantomime, and the Communicative Face in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence.” Edith Wharton Review 22.1 (2006): 1-5.

Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Candace Waid. New York: Norton, 2002.

---. A Backward Glance. New York: Scribner’s, 1934.

---. The Letters of Edith Wharton. Eds. R.W.B. Lewis, Nancy Lewis, and William R. Tyler. New York: Scribner’s, 1988.

---. Collected Stories: 1911-1937. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of America, 2001.

---. French Ways and Their Meanings. New York: Appleton, 1919.

---. The Reef. New York: Appleton, 1912.

---. The Writing of Fiction. New York: Scribner’s, 1925.

* * *

Research Question, Abstract, Concept Map Stuff, and Bibliography

2007-03-12T16:45:00.000-06:00

Final Paper CMAP Analysis and Abstract

CMAP

My map shows me that I have a good sense of fiction’s historical tradition, both with its older roots—Poe’s unity of effect and Henry James’ “The Art of Fiction”—and its newer discourses (Madison Smart Bell, Charles Baxter, Rober Olen Butler). What this map clearly reveals, however, is a lack of texts on the social. Some of the material we have read in class might help me (LeFevre addresses creative writing, for instance), but I obviously have to find rhetorical/theoretical texts that help deepen my understanding of creative writing pedagogy and how the social might fit within such a pedagogy. The Anna Leahy edited text looks promising since it seems to reevaluate the creative writing classroom for the 21^st century.

Abstract

In her book Invention as a Social Act, Karen LeFevre writes, “While literary academicians and fiction writers are often wary of each other, one point on which both camps can agree is to be suspicious of anyone who talks about the need of readers.” LeFevre’s comments are both true and false. On the one hand, creative writing appears to resist the social. Landmark essays on creative writing, such as Frank O’Connor’s “The Lonely Voice,” buttress the notion of the creative artist as a shipwrecked soul, marooned from the rest of society. However, most contemporary literary writers have at least a passing familiarity with theory, as evidenced through the “moves” contemporary writers make or resist: an avoidance of closure, a resistance to epiphany, an embrace of playfulness, a disavowal of symbols, the joyous deconstruction of the author as know-it-all. Literary fiction, then, is deeply indebted to contemporary theory (though literary fiction tries to avoid didacticism). Why then do current notions of creative writing (invention, pedagogy, what-have-you) turn away from recognition of the social? How can the binary of individual artists vs. outside society be breached, made more complex? Thus, my tentative research question is as follows: how can contemporary notions of the “social” fit within a contemporary creative writing pedagogy?

Bibliography

Baxter, Charles. Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. St. Paul: Graywolf, 1998.

Baxter, Charles, Peter Turchi, eds. Bringing the Devil to his Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001.

Bell, Madison Smart. Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.

Berlin, James. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies. West Lafayette: Parlor P, 2003.

Butler, Robert Olen. From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction. New York: Grove Press, 2006.

Cixou, Hélène. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction. New York: Vintage, 1985.

James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” Tales of Henry James: The Texts of the Stories, the Author on His Craft, Background and Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1984.

Leahy, Anna, ed. Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project. North Somerset, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005.

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

May, Charles, E, ed. The New Short Story Theories. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1994.

O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. Hoboken: Melville House,

Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Philosophy of Composition.” Essays and Reviews. Ed. G. Richard Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984.

---. “The Poetic Principle.” Essays and Reviews. Ed. G. Richard Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984.

Sparks, Debra. Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005.

Court's Cmap, Abstract and Works Cited

2007-03-12T15:47:00.000-06:00

I'm hoping that my Cmap is accessible--when I clcik on the question mark icon it takes me to it, and I hope that's the same for everyone else. I think I'm the only one using Thinkature instead of the other site, and that's probably the source of my woes. I also have the flu, so my thoughts are muddled--I'll do my best to be clear.

Preface to abstract: One thing that has interested me for quite some time is the role of the university within democracy. In terms of rhetoric and the social, we have seen this concern arise several times in the texts that we have read, specifically in terms of critical pedagogy. At the same time that this pedagogical role of rhetoric within democracy is being theorized, there is a sense that liberal democracy is itself being interrogated--we have seen this in the Crowley reading, of course, but I believe that Crowley's concern is part of a broader issue (the culture wars, of course, but there are other variations... the Habermas-Lyotard debate, for example, was largely couched in terms of the limits of Enlightenment positivism and liberalism). There is, then, an ongoing reconstitution of society, of the social, and here Latour's work is indispensable. For my research paper, I want to investigate the role critical pedagogy might continue to play in terms of the reconstituted social in terms of enacting democracy in the classroom. My research question, then, is given that rhetoric and democracy are intimately related, yet that the social is being reconstituted, what is the role of rhet/comp classrooms in serving as sites for enacting democracy?

Abstract:

The role of rhetoric is central to the liberal democracy of the United States. Rhetoric is used at all levels of government--it is used in crafting legislation, it is used to persuade juries and justices, it is used to persuade the country to go to war. An ability to engage rhetoric--to use it, critique it, synthesize it with one's own beliefs and past experiences--is arguably crucial to one's role as a citizen. This centrality of rhetoric, of language, in the enacting of democracy is thus a concern for those concerned with the teaching of rhetoric and language--as Gerald Graff asserts in his "Foreward" to Richard Ohmann's _English in America: A Radical View of the Profession_, "...whoever controls language controls the way we think and act. With the massive expansion of American democratic education in this country, school and college English teachers have considerable opportunity to shape the way young Americans talk, write, and think about the world. That is no doubt why the teaching of English and the humanities has become a major battleground in the recent war over culture" (ix). This "recent war of culture," however, has foregrounded critiques of liberal democracy from various corners. Sharon Crowley, for example, outlines what she sees as an emerging Christian fundamentalist hegemony which advocates values incompatible with those of liberal democracy, while Slavoj Zizek sees liberalism as hopelessly mired in capitalism, which is itself a fundamentalism. There is a challenge to liberal democracy on broader grounds--that of a critique of the Enlightenment project of modernity-- made to various degrees and ends by figures such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Part of this critique involves the positing of the social construction of identity and of knowledge itself--philosophers of science such as Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty have engaged the social construction of scientific knowledge. Reason, liberalism, positivism--all are being interrogated. One might say that they have been exhausted, just as the social sciences have been exhausted in the view of Bruno Latour. Latour concedes that work within the social sciences has been productive, but the very success of these efforts has led to a point where constituents can not be separated from the social domain--the connections between these constituents have to be retraced, reconfigured, reconstituted in order for us to understand society as it now exists. As a point of departure, then, it seems productive to integrate Latour's Actor Network Theory and his ideas in _Reassembling the Social_ with those of critical pedagogy in order to address what role rhetoric and composition is to play in the enacting of democracy as the "war over culture" is waged in classrooms and other social spaces.

Critical pedagogy includes within several figures and their individual approaches. A survey of the most promising among them might prove productive to engaging the reassembled social in an effor to enact democracy. Paulo Freire's _Pedagogy of the Oppressed_ immediately comes to mind, as does a work highly iinfluenced by it, bell hooks' _Teaching to Transgress_. The _Rhetorical Democracy_ project headed by Gerard Hauser can contribute much, as can James Berlin's work, as well as work collected in _Composition and Resistance_, edited by C. Mark Haulbert and Michael Blitz. Other authors whose work in engaged pedagogy is to be considered include Andrea Greenbaum, Patricia Bizzell, Richard Ohmann and Gerald Graff. A related thread to consider is how the writer/rhetor can be regarded as the subject of contending social forces--this thread dovetails with other theories of social construction that have been considered and writers in this vein include Kurt Spellmeyer, David Bartholomae, and Karen Burke LeFevre.

Another thread that might be productive in exploring the intersection between the reassembled social and critical pedagogy is the role critical theory might explicitly play. One emergent quality of society in the past few decades has been the foregrounding of pluralism, though pluralism is arguably itself a democratic principle. Pluralism has played out in terms of identity politics and multiculturalism, and while these developments have proved problematic, an offshoot of each is the possibility of hybridized identities, such as Gloria Anzaldua's Mestiza identity in _La frontera_/_Borderlands_. Anzaldua, in fact, epitomizes the matrix of identity that exists between race, gender, class and sexual orienation (one might add ideology, as well). The hybrid--or even cyborg or post-human (Donna Haraway's and Lyotard's terms, respectively) is arguably the model citizen of the reassembled social: the hybrid serves as metaphor for what constitutes the reassembled society.

Works Cited:

Anzaldua, Gloria. La frontera/Borderlands. San Francisco : Aunt Lute Books, c1999.

Bartholomae, David. Writing on the Margins: Essays on Composition and Teaching. Boston : Bedford/St. Martins, c2005.

Berlin, James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction In American Colleges 1900 1985. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, c1987.

Berlin, James A. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996.

Bizzell, Patricia. Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York :
Routledge, 1990.

Crowley, Sharon. Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism. Pittsburgh, PA : University of Pittsburgh Press, c2006.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York : Continuum, 1986, c1970.

Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Greenbaum, Andrea. Emancipatory Movements in Composition. Albany : State University of New York Press, c2002.

Habermas, Jürgen. “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” reprinted in The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press, 1983.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press ; Cambridge, England : Polity Press, 1989.

Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” reprinted in The Haraway Reader. New York : Routledge, 2004.

Hauser, Gerard A. and Amy Grim, Eds. Rhetorical Democracy: Discursive Practices of Civic Engagement: Selected Papers from the 2002 Conference of the Rhetoric Society of America. Mahwah, N.J. : Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York : Routledge, 1994.

Hulbert, C. Mark and Michael Blitz, Eds. Composition and Resistance. Portsmouth, NH : Boynton/Cook, c1991.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1970

Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1993.

Latour, Bruno. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press ; [Karlsruhe, Germany] : ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, c2005.

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention As a Social Act. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, c1987.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c1984.

Ohmann, Richard. English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. New York : Oxford University Press, 1976.

Smit, David W. The End of Composition Studies. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, c2004.

Spellmeyer, Kurt. Common Ground : Dialogue, Understanding, And The Teaching Of Composition. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice Hall, c1993.

Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London : Verso, 2002.

Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in the Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago

My Crowley CMAP

2007-03-12T15:22:00.000-06:00

Network Narrativity: Abstract and Bibliography

2007-03-12T14:55:00.000-06:00

Hey, everyone. Sorry the blog is formatting this funny; I'll bring hard copies of the abstract and bibliography for everyone to see.

Research Question: What narrative forms fit the network model?

Basic outline of research method:
Research narrative paradigms, network theory, and connections between them.
Make any more connections suggested by the research.

Abstract

The conversation represented by the concept map is one where discussions of narrative and network culture are displayed. The connections within each discussion show how current ideas about each developed, and the connections between them show how they overlap. My final project will attempt to map their overlap further, by showing where networks and narratives are already embodied; the summaries of each scholar’s ideas help to show his/her contribution to that conversation.
The conversation centered around narratives relies primarily on Walter Fisher’s discussion of the importance of the narrative paradigm, which pulls in other scholars’ voices, too. Fisher applies Aristotelian thinking to the Lyotardian dichotomy of narrative and scientific knowledge. Where Lyotard exposed this dichotomy, and pointed to the metanarrative that underpins it, and called on us for the skepticism that is the postmodern condition, Fisher finds in ancient rhetoric the idea that all knowledge can be seen as narrative. He sees, in Aristotle’s discussion of practical knowledge, a basis for arguing that all knowledge is relative, and that narrative, therefore, is essential for transmission of knowledge. He draws on Pagels’ assertion that scientific knowledge is too complex for us to simply incorporate, to argue that narratives are becoming more essential as modes of knowing. The more complex our world becomes, the more we need narratives to take it in.
This complexity ties into the conversation about networks, which is centered primarily around the discussions of Latour, Taylor, and Shaviro, who draw on a range of sources to depict networks and their implications. Latour’s discussion of actor-network theory (ANT) is grounded in Tarde’s discussion of the social, that the social can’t be conceived as its own entity. He draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to show that social systems can be seen as networks, dynamic and fragile, that incorporate the nonhuman as well. Taylor takes the network conversation into more virtual and cultural territory, arguing that our culture is reaching a “moment of complexity” where it will come to resemble a network more than any other form. His discussion focuses primarily on the cybernetic model of the network. This model is represented at length by Shaviro, who analyzes the appearances of networks in science fiction and elsewhere, showing how pervasive and animate they are in our imaginations. The above models of networks seem to converge in the work of Jeff Rice, who draws on ANT in his discussion of the virtual world, the blogosphere, and other clearly network-based entities. All of the above seem to draw somewhat on the work of Lyotard, and also of Jameson, who, as Shaviro notes, discusses “hyperspace,” the anonymous social spaces of airports and similar places, where membership in a network becomes the primary source of identity. Since, as the above scholars argue, there’s some basis for understanding ourselves this way all the time, narrative embodiments of it seem especially important.
Postmodern experimentation with narrative suggests the search for a new model that will help to represent networks. This conversation centers primarily, for now, around Senturk’s research into the hadith transmission system, a network of narrative used by Islamic scholars from the seventh to sixteenth centuries, in which each scholar would know a short story of the life of Muhammad, which could be offered to audiences. While Senturk’s discussion centers primarily around the relationship between social and literary structures, the above scholarship suggests that the hadith model can be seen in terms of network and narrative—each narrator carries a piece of an overall narrative, so that network and narrative are one, enacted by the telling, connecting the narrator to another member of the network. Senturk draws on Barthes’ conception of the critic as one who disrupts traditional narrative patterns, and his research makes for a post-disruption starting point.
This idea of network narrative, where they simultaneously bring each other into being, has at least one interesting contemporary corollary. Shelley Jackson’s web site, “SKIN,” portrays a project where participants volunteer to have individual words tattooed on their bodies. Her site shows photographs of body parts, and the assemblage of photographs constitutes, if not a narrative, a language poem where postmodern fragmentation of narrative is embodied. Hopefully further research will turn up other correspondences.

Bibliography

Aristotle. Introduction to Aristotle. 2nd ed. R. McKeon, trans. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1947.

Barthes, Roland. The Semiotic Challenge. Trans. R. Howard. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1988.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Fisher, Walter. “Narration, Knowledge, and the Possibility of Wisdom.”
Rethinking Knowledge: Reflections Across the Disciplines.
Ed. Walter Fisher and Robert Goodman. Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1995.

Jackson, Shelley. “SKIN.” http://www.ineradicablestain.com/skin.html

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge.
Trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Manchester: Manchester UP.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word.
London: Methuen, 1982.

Pagels, Heinz. The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Age
of Complexity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Rice, Jeff. “Network Academics.” Yellow Dog. http://ydog.net/?page_id=345

Senturk, Recep. Narrative Social Structure: Anatomy of the Hadith
Transmission Network, 610-1505. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.

Shaviro, Steven. Connected, or What it Means to Live in a Network Society.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Taylor, Mark. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Tarde, Gabriel. Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology. Trans. H. Warren.
Ontario: Batoche Books, 2000.

Fish and Rice

2007-03-12T13:19:00.000-06:00

Like many others, it seems, I was disappointed that Crowley didn't turn to more practical matters of how to implement her recommendations (something like how to do it in a writing classroom, for example) and I was left puzzled as to how I would do so--as were others. Apparently, we had better figure it out. So says Stanley Fish in "One University Under God?" which appeared in _The Chronicle of Higher Education_, back on January 5, 2005. Has any one blogged about this before or is any one else familiar with it? I know Fish has come up several times--but this piece really dovetails with what we're talking about now. Here's a link to it: http://chronicle.com/jobs/2005/01/2005010701c.htm

I titled my last post "Stanley Fish predicted this..." because he did, in fact, seemingly predict the terms we've been engaging the past couple of weeks. Fish sees things very much in the same way that Crowley does--religion is challenging liberalism as a dominant hegemony in the U.S.--this is "where the action is"--and academics are going to be front and center, so we need to formulate how we're going to engage the issue. For Fish, 9/11 foregrouned and intensified the matter, as "there often seems to be nothing else in the news, as we continue to debate the questions that were being asked within hours of the attack on the World Trade Center..." and we ask ourselves if these questions can "...be solved by rational analysis? Is rationality the right standard to invoke in the context of matters of faith? Can faith and reason be reconciled? Should they be?"

Fish foregrounds the hegemonies of faith and reason, just as Crowley does, and Fish follows in asserting that "even before the events of September 2001, there was a growing recognition in many sectors that religion as a force motivating action could not long be sequestered in the private sphere, where the First Amedment, as read in the light of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, had seemed to place it." Locke and Jefferson both called for a separation between church and state, and according to Fish, "As we entered the last decade of the century, it could still be said that the wall of separation was pretty much in place. But in the last 15 years a lot has changed, and by 2000, observers were alert to the change and commenting on it. Peter Beinert, in the midst of the Bush-Gore election campaign, predicted that 'religion will increasingly replace electoral politics as the realm where battles for the national soul are fought.'"

Fish cites "a number of developments" as key to why we've arrived at the present moment:

"a growing lack of confidence in the capacity of the political process to do (or even recognize) the right thing; a feeling, sometimes vague and sometimes sharply articulated, that there is something missing at the heart of American life; the increasing political activism of fundamentalist faiths; the rise of 'New Age' spirituality and the proliferation of 'spiritual paths'; the emergence of 'identity politics,' politics that eschews universal standards of judgment in favor of judgments tied to group interests; the related emergence of multiculturalism, which honors the values of particular cultures and calls into question the availability or even the existence of an independent set of values recognized by all rational persons; the appearance in the law of the 'cultural defense,' the defense that says 'because it's not a crime in the country I came from, I shouldn't be charged with a crime if I do it here.'"

Fish echoes Crowley in citing "increasing political activism of fundamentalist faiths" as one of the factors, but I thought it interesting that he also included "identity politics" and "the related emergence of multiculturalism." Jeff Rice touched on this in his blog, too:

"As I read through [_Towards a Civil Discourse_], I also wanted to hear more about how fundamentalism has learned how to turn 'liberalism' and multiculturalism back on itself. If multiculturalism’s argument is to allow divergent views and beliefs, then it has to allow for fundamentalism. Oops! Inclusivity is dangerous. This is what intelligent design has done so well. Advocates for intelligent design are using the language of multiculturalism to justify the idea’s teaching.

The same for democracy, right? Aren’t the fundamentalists merely taking advantage of the democratic opportunities afforded them? That they will undermine this system later on shouldn’t matter; they are enjoying the rights to run for office like any other group. They get elected. They can change the laws. Isn’t that what we allow? The principle of democracy as opposed to its specifics?"

Rice's answer to his own question is:

"Well, no. Neither case is that simple.... In Crowley’s disgust with the rise of fundamentalism in American politics, I think she doesn’t spend time complicating this issue in terms of the larger arguments at stake regarding the rhetoric of democracy or equality. Winning an election to then undermine democracy cannot be valued as is. Ethics are not generalized situations. They must be put into context (and by context, I think I mean what Latour calls the social more than what cultural studies might call context). To do that for only one group (Christian fundamentalists) and to not note the phenomenon and problem overall does weaken the text. I say that because I want to think more about fundamentalism within an overall network of relationships."

I think a couple of things are missing from Rice's critique (he resists calling it that--prefering the term "respons," but I tend to think of "criticism" in the neutral sense and, in any event, what Rice does *is* certainly criticism, whether he wants to call it that or not). One thing that is missing is present in Fish's analysis; another is something that's inchoate within my own psyche but I'll try my best to explain it. First, Fish: while Rice answers his own charges about democracy and (related) multiculturalism (a principle of liberal democracy is tolerance, as Crowley explains well) containing within themselves their own undoing, Fish does a better job, I think, of explaining why the challenges of fundamentalism outlined by Rice are not dead-end fatalisms of liberalism and democracy (and universities that value their tenets). Fish puts it well, so I'll quote him at length:

"...it is one thing to take religion as an object of study and another to take religion seriously. To take religion seriously would be to regard it not as a phenomenon to be analyzed at arm's length, but as a candidate for the truth. In liberal theory, however, the category of truth has been reserved for hypotheses that take their chances in the 'marketplace of ideas.'

Religious establishments will typically resist the demand that basic tenets of doctrine be submitted to the test of deliberative reason. (The assertion that Christ is risen is not one for which evidence pro and con is adduced in a juridical setting.) That is why in 1915 the American Association of University Professors denied to church-affiliated institutions of higher learning the name of 'university'; such institutions, it was stated, 'do not, at least as regards one particular subject, accept the principles of freedom and inquiry.' That is, in such institutions the truths of a particular religion are presupposed and are not subjected to the rigorous and skeptical operations of rational deliberation.

What that meant, in effect, was that in the name of the tolerant inclusion of all views in the academic mix, it was necessary to exclude views that did not honor tolerance as a first and guiding principle.

Walter Lippmann laid down the rule: 'Reason and free inquiry can be neutral and tolerant only of those opinions which submit to the test of reason and inquiry.' And what do you do with 'opinions' (a word that tells its own story) that do not submit? Well, you treat them as data and not as candidates for the truth. You teach the Bible as literature -- that is, as a body of work whose value resides in its responsiveness to the techniques of (secular) literary analysis.

Or you teach American Puritanism as a fascinating instance of a way of thinking we have moved beyond: There used to be these zealots and they wanted to run things, but we've gotten over that and now we can study them without being drawn into the disputes about which they were so passionate."

Fish is, of course, almost as heavy-handed as Crowley here, and it's because he sees "a growing awareness of the difficulty, if not impossibility," of keeping the old boundaries in place and of quarantinong the religious impulse in the safe houses of the church, the synagogue, and the mosque." In other words, the spheres of the public (democracy) and private (religion) are intersecting, and this pheonomenon is spilling over into academia. In fact, the academy is a central site for it--Fish concludes his piece by striking the same tone that Crowley and Berlin have:

"To the extent that liberalism's structures have been undermined or at least shaken by these analyses ["religion, or communitarianism, or multiculturalism"] the perspicuousness and usefulness of distinctions long assumed -- reason as opposed to faith, evidence as opposed to revelation, inquiry as opposed to obedience, truth as opposed to belief -- have been called into question. And finally (and to return to where we began), the geopolitical events of the past decade and of the past three years especially have re-alerted us to the fact (we always knew it, but as academics we were able to cabin it) that hundreds of millions of people in the world do not observe the distinction between the private and the public or between belief and knowledge, and that it is no longer possible for us to regard such persons as quaintly pre-modern or as the needy recipients of our saving (an ironic word) wisdom.

Some of these are our sworn enemies. Some of them are our colleagues. Many of them are our students. (There are 27 religious organizations for students on my campus.) Announce a course with "religion" in the title, and you will have an overflow population. Announce a lecture or panel on "religion in our time" and you will have to hire a larger hall.

And those who come will not only be seeking knowledge; they will be seeking guidance and inspiration, and many of them will believe that religion -- one religion, many religions, religion in general -- will provide them.

Are we ready?

We had better be, because that is now where the action is. When Jacques Derrida died I was called by a reporter who wanted know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion."

Here's What I Would Have Done...

2007-03-12T08:57:00.000-06:00

I’ve enjoyed Crowley’s book. I can’t deny that she has her biases, but I’ll say that her biases don’t bother me much. For whatever reason, I found her final chapter particularly compelling with its distinction between epideictic and deliberative rhetoric and its nods toward invention. Still, there are a couple of things I would have liked to have seen more of in this chapter. The first would be a better discussion of cognitive dissonance, which she hints toward in her summary of Stanley Fish, and the second would be a more in-depth consideration of the potential counter-hegemonic practices.

I’m not necessarily a fan of social science theories, but I’m interested in cognitive dissonance as a strategy for persuasion. The idea is that you need to get the audience to realize that at least two of their own beliefs or experiences are in opposition to each other. You need to get an audience to recognize the contradiction and suggest a means by which they can reconcile the situation and reduce the anxieties brought about by that contradiction. Of course there is also a chance that instead of audience members simply getting defensive and finding ways to dismiss the information you are providing them, but ideally, you will have gotten them to question their own ideological assumptions. The Klansman example from the book is excellent. When I teach persuasion in public speaking class I sometimes discuss cognitive dissonance with my students and I’ll probably swipe that illustration for my own use.

The most obvious example of a counterhegemonic practice might be when disenfranchised groups appropriate the language of their oppressors – women who will call themselves and each other “bitches” or “whores” or when LGBT individuals use the word “faggot” or “dyke.” Similarly, Helene Shugart (1997) wrote an article in QJS that describes how particular pieces of discourse use appropriation to a counterhegemonic effect. Clearly, there are plenty of examples of how appropriation can be negative and only encourage hegemony, but it is precisely for this reason that I think appropriation as a means to a sort of emancipation is so interesting.

Basically, I think Crowley touches on some good strategies for both persuasion and resistance that deserve some more attention. Using cognitive dissonance as a persuasive method and using appropriation as a counterhegemonic act ought to be considered for whether they can make anything better or worse between groups that seem undeniably opposed to one another’s ideas.

Stanley Fish predicted this...

2007-03-11T21:41:00.000-06:00

I feel like I'm still not in stasis, if you will, with the discussion on Crowley and actually one reason why I talked so much in class last time is that I felt like a lot of what I saw Crowley is *trying* to do overall in my working through the text (the first half of the book, as this is what we were talking about at the time) was falling by the wayside as we were talking about our reactions to what might be called her tone and examples, and I wanted to unpack those elements. I pointed out in class and in my posts before class (see below) the following: Crowley doesn't make broad claims against all Christians, but rather is concerned with those who have sought to reconstitute the role of faith in politics--to merge the private with the public; that Crowley's project is to demonstrate that *fundamentalist* (and/or apocalyptic) Christianity has become a dominant hegemony in the U.S. and a challenge to the competing "default" hegemony of liberalism; that the values inherent to liberalism “double" as values inherent to democracy, and so the challenge to them must be engaged if liberal democracy is to be preserved; but that liberal rhetoric is ill-suited to engage fundamentalist Christianity because stasis between liberalism and Christian fundamentalism is not met; and so a reformulated rhetorical theory, one that marries a postmodern orientation with rhetorical strategies--both modern and ancient (I explained this in class and Dr. Strickland then did the nice schematic on the board)--is better-suited for engaging the new hegemony (here I've actually just copied, pasted, and edited the first part of my last entry which was posted before class last time).

The reason why I stress what I see to be the central points in Crowley thus far is that It seems to me like Crowley's work is still being conflated with an attack on Christianity, in general, and that her overall point is still being lost in the translation. First, however, I want to acknowledge that what I see now that I've read the second half of the book is that much of this is her own fault. Like Kevin, I see both others' points about it being a one-sided argument and that it's a missed opportunity. What seems like a promising overall project--minding the gap between these two hegemonies--is often lost in digressive screeds that she either never brings back and reconnects or does so in a scattershot and rushed manner (both Kevin and David S point this out very well in thier respective posts). The worst aspects of the first half of the book are writ large and given center stage in the second half (as Faith promised they would last week). The end result then, is the feeling that, as David S says, while "...Crowley's original idea is a good one: to look at the current debates that seem to divid people and see if there's a way to bring rhetoric into the mix... The 'new' angle that Crowley wishes to add to the mix--ancient rhetoric, with a twist, as a possible solution--never really takes flight." And so, somewhat like Chad, I'm left wondering "how to incorporate Crowely's ideas, aside from stressing to students the need for pathos."

I do, however, think that Crowley is on to something--like I said last week, she's like Berlin in that she sees a crisis. Berlin calls it the culture wars, while Crowely resists using such a loaded term (I think she would have been better off if she went that route, however--as I said last week, I think it's her use of religion that trips so many wires). She'd much rather set her sights on this one specific aspect of the divide. Again, while Crowley shoots herself in the foot in discussing Christianity (and while she maybe should have actually spent *more* time defining her terms), I don't think that she's framing her argument in terms of liberalism versus Christianity as a whole (and if she is, I'm missing it--and once it's shown to me, I'll abadon my support of her argument and throw it behind the ghost that I've created in her place). Nor do I think she fails to acknowledge that there those who describe themselves as fundamentalist Christians who *also* aren't who she's talking about (for her discussion of this, once again, revisit pages 6-9). I think she acknowledges the complexity of Christianity early on, then moves to solely discussing those she sees as trying to enact a theonomy in the United States, that is, those who are *actively trying to introduce their version of Christianity into the political sphere*. In terms of whether or not there are fundamentalist Christians who are trying to incorporate their faith into the Constitution, etc. (both those outside of government and within government already), I think there is no disputing the fact (see Terry Schiavo, gay marriage, etc.) and it's intellecutally dishonest to say otherwise. Whether or not this effort is a credible threat (or, indeed, not something to be welcomed) or whether it's a lot of talk (done for money, votes, or both) is a matter of debate, obviously. I tend to see the intersection of sincere faith and demcracy as indeed being a site of ongoing struggle (both personal and public) that has existed since the founding of the nation, and so maybe Crowley's alarmist tone is a little unwarranted. But I also think we should articulate what she's actually saying first.

Once we have, I think it's fruitful to move on to some of the many justified objections and qualifications that have been made. I think Faith makes several *excellent* points in her discussion of how complexity-points that no number of qualifications on Crowley's part can resist. Faith details the number of authors who have studied faith in a perhaps more "authentic" (my word, not Faith's) way. Faith describes Amy Frykholm as opening her _Rapture Culture_ "with a moving and candid story about [her] own spirituality, how it conflicts with her feminist views, and her admission that 'I could not resolve the tension between my dislike for the books and my appreciation of their readers' (9)." Faith also quotes James Barr, who asserts that fundamentialism is more of an "ecumenical problem" within Christianity, one of a radical group outside of the mainstream. Faith goes on to make excellent points, citing Paul Boyer and Susan Harding, problematizing Crowley's characterizations of the influence of fundamentalism, and Faith points out (I can't say it any better) that these writers "don't see hegemony--they see complexity.... They seem to be talking about real people as opposed to a disembodied discourse." For me, this last turn of phrase really put a fine point on it--again, I don't think we (including Crowley) are all in stasis. I think Faith's excellent summary of her objections to Crowley demonstrate how Crowley failed to perform precisely what she advocates. Faith's post reminded me of something that I thought of last week, of how there have been very similar discussions about essentially the same problem, only instead of "liberalism" and "fundamentalism," the other surrogate actors--"Democrats" (liberals) and "Republicans" (conservatives), or "blue states" and "red states" (again, the "culture wars") were used. I remember reading about how many who live in so-called "red states" feel that Democrats simply don't understand them, don't speak in a common language, and ultimately seem to dismiss and disrespect them.

The discussion surrounded several books that were published around the same, including Thomas Frank's _What's the Matter with Kansas?_ (which Crowley discusses briefly early on), George Lakoff's _Dont Think of an Elephant_, and especially Jim Wallis' _God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It_. Lakoff, a linguist, makes much of a similar argument to that of Crowley, arguing that those who want to combat the conservative hegemony need to learn how to frame their arguments to counter their co-opting of much of the language. Franks points out that Kansans (a surrogate for many who live in pretty much every red state) vote against their economic interests because they identify with Republicans who speak to them in *emotional* terms--they speak of "traditional values" and warn of the looney left's designs to destroy those values. Wallis, in a way, mirrors Crowley (and in a way turns her on her head). Wallis is himself an evangelical Christian and the editor of _Soujourners_ magazine. But he agrees with Crowley both in that there are problems on both sides of divide and that liberals are the best canidates to solve the problem. Very much like Crowely he sees cause for alarm: Wallis belives that Christianity's true purpose is to serve God by focussing on social ills (things like war, poverty, lack of health care and education, not sexuality and censorship). He feels that liberal values and "authentic" Christian values largely dovetail, but that liberals have treated religion as anathema while conservatives have co-opted religion as a way to polarize the country, get elected and stay in power. Like Crowley, Willis wants to bridge the divide, calling for a hybridization of religion and liberalism, where spiritual guidance is married with liberal causes. Just as Crowley wishes to reintroduce pathos and belief to reconstitute a rhetoric of persuasion, Willis wishes to reintroduce faith into liberal discourse.

Having read these books, I thought that Crowley was doing much of the same thing with rhetoric per se--and she is, I guess--only not as successfully.

Contingency

2007-03-11T21:27:00.000-06:00

Crowley talks a lot about contingency (beats us over the head with it really). She embraces contingency because, well, that's part of the theoretical turn (nothing grounded, everything situational/contextual). I agree about the importance of contingency, but I would be curious what, if anything, Crowley might change in her book given the situation today. Her book was published in 2006, but the events she cites seem to go no later than 2004. I have a point here, I swear. Did Toward a Civil Discourse come about, in part, as a reaction to the George W. Bush years? Crowley, as a liberal rhetor, might have looked at the world around her and decided that everything had gone to hell and that someone needed to burden the blame. Crowley chooses to blame fundamentalist/apocalyptic Christians. But was such a focus hasty? No doubt that America is steeped in religion. No doubt that Christians wield political punch. No doubt that hardcore Christian nutjobs make their voices heard? But one of the biggest problems I had when reading Crowley's book is that I never really bought the notion that apocalyptic Christians are achieving anything close to hegemony in American culture. Yes, America currently leans to the right, but not the radical right. Americans might fall asleep at the wheel sometimes (2004 Presidential election anyone?), but they eventually wake up--they always do. Americans resist extremes; Americans are centrist. The recent 2006 elections show this, with Republicans losing many seats in the House and Senate. Missouri voted in McCaskill. All this is just a way of saying that, yes, a rhetor is always tied to a specific moment, and perhaps the moment from which Crowley wrote wasn't quite the moment she thought it was--or maybe that moment changed for the better. Maybe apocalyptic Christians are not the ones we need to be worrying about.

Electric Bibles and so on...

2007-03-11T20:01:00.000-06:00

Mark's post in particular got me thinking about how we view the fundamentalists and apocalptists and such. While I haven't checked his historical background to PROVE that the Christian right affected those movements, I'll buy it, 'cause Mark's a stand up guy. Another stand up fellow, and the focus of my post, would be one of those religious folks we haven't mentioned....Johnny Cash....

If that link works you can enjoy a quiant version of armageddon as he sees it. What's interesting to me, besides the fact that I'm a huge fan, is that I read Crowley and respond with: yep. fundamentalism is NOT the way to go. But then I turn to the Man in Black, and don't really mind that he's been seen hawking the electric bible on QVC in days of yore. It seems as if folks are sharing where they're coming from with this topic, and so here's my bit: raised Lutheran (look penitent) and left it behind, but while on my way to a lack of faith, I DID attend a tent revival, watched them bless the handkerchiefs, heal the infirm, etc.

While I still regard that, as well as much of what Crowley is writing against as something I'm not down with, I would put a good bit of Johnny's "back to the Lord" albums in that same vein...I can't comment on the actual politics behind his views, since I've not considered it until this very moment--talk about cognitive dissonance--but I always pictured him on the side of the poor and beaten down, thus the outfit, right?

Prophets, False or Otherwise

2007-03-11T17:05:00.000-06:00

So we’re reading about prophecy and Christians who want to rid our society of evil. What strikes me is how much I am reminded of something Crowley has mentioned several times throughout this book – in American history, Christian activists have had a significant, and arguably positive influence. Abolitionism, women’s suffrage, and civil rights are just a few movements that were encouraged through Christian efforts. If so many Americans identify as Christian, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that Biblical arguments crafted by Christian rhetors have been successful.

There’s a lot more to it though. James Darsey wrote a book called The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America that talks about the logos, pathos and ethos characteristic of this type of discourse. As the title implies, he views this sort of activism as radical. He counts Wendell Phillips’ abolitionism and Eugene Debs’ socialist efforts to attain better conditions for American workers among the best examples of this radical/prophetic tradition. Joe McCarthy also gets a mention for embodying the characteristics of prophetic rhetoric that Darsey outlines.

I really don’t care for the religious right we see today. But Darsey’s book makes me wonder if only time will tell whether today’s prophetic rhetors are as crazy as I tend to believe they are. History will probably have to have its' say in all this. The agitators described above can each be credited with stirring things up in society, but I think that history views them each very differently. It’s hard to say whether Falwell, LaHaye, Robertson, etc. ought to be considered part of the prophetic tradition. It’s even harder to decide what it means if they are.

Crowley's Dichotomy

2007-03-11T15:10:00.000-06:00

Thanks for such great thoughts on Crowley and what she's trying to do, everyone. Reading your posts helps me to understand her more, and Kevin's helped me to think more about her split between fundamentalist rhetoric and liberal rhetoric. This is one of the book's most fascinating explorations, and the merging of the two seems like the civil discourse she's trying to map a path to. The book itself is not primarily a scholarly mapping of the two, but an embedding of that exploration into what seems like a justification and guide for persuading fundamentalists to abandon their positions. Maybe the pages devoted to showing how awful the far right commentators can be is meant to stir us to action, but I come to it expecting something a little more distanced and nuanced, where I don't have to read Dobson's tirade against Stephanopolous to find out how to reconcile disparate rhetorics. Crowley's book ends up being a test-piloting of this passionate liberal rhetoric she's arguing for, so I, as a reader, end up being a barometer of its effectiveness.

One of the many interesting thoughts inspired by this book is the one that maybe the binary opposition of fundamentalist and liberal can be collapsed. Crowley's depiction of their differences is really interesting, and I found myself nodding in sudden enlightenment, then thinking "huh." Because no fundamentalist would say, "while you liberals believe in a scientifically verifiable reality, I believe in one dictated by God, who is in my heart." The idea that faith can be differentiated from reason is one that Lyotard and his cronies helped to dismantle for us in their exploration of metanarratives. Are the basic differences that she establishes between fundamentalist and liberal culture really as she draws them, or does each group simply draw on different myths?

Crowley

2007-03-11T10:44:00.001-06:00

Like everyone else, I think, the second part of Crowley’s book left me somewhat flummoxed. Like David said, there are parts that are very clear to me, and others that I’m unsure why are there. But there is one part that means something to me.

In the 1980’s (ancient times to most of you) I was raising a small child in the country with a television that received only one channel. It was there that I met with bits and pieces of the bizarre rhetoric of Jim and Tammy Faye Baker. These two were Christian fundamentalists, apocolyptists in Crowley’s terms, who had a very popular television show. The line—how they drew audiences in—was that sometime during the 1980’s the world would end, Jesus would return, and everyone had to make ready. It must have been a very strong message, because the two raised millions upon millions, built an entire holiday resort for their congregation, and homes, boats and planes for themselves. The people who gave them money were ready to believe that they were among the chosen who would ascend into heaven. Then it became 1990. Jim was busted (I think for tax evasion) and it came out that the pair’s marriage wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The ministry went belly up, everything was lost, and out there in TV land were all those people who had believed.

The point is that this is very strong stuff, and that it can be used to manipulate individuals and politics. I don’t know if I buy into Crowley’s version of 911, but I know that I’ll think about it now. No, it hadn’t come to my attention before. It is this kind strong rhetoric that gives people an ability to see themselves as superior that is frightening. No, Christians aren’t bad, but the rhetoric that pulls people into feeling superior is. The Nazi’s used it, the Klan used it, and it works because people feel alone, frightened and weak.

There are many Christians out there who do not spout, listen to, or promote this kind of thing, but for the most part their messages are not the ones being heard. I do not have a problem with being Christian, I have a problem with those who so strongly desire to be seen as superior or better, that they will harass, disparage, or disrespect everyone else. I think this is what Crowley, in part, is getting at. She wants us to be aware of what is going on around us, and the effect that is possible because of it. I think she may be right.

2007-03-10T21:12:00.000-06:00

Faith's post is really excellent, and I sense that she knows a lot more about the issues that Crowley is dealing with than I do. As an agnostic who grew up with a non-practicing Jewish father and a once-Catholic mother, I found all this reading on apocalyptism fascinating, but fascinating for perhaps all the wrong reasons--fascinating because I was drawn into lurid accounts of strange sects.

Still, as I said in class the other day, something bothered me about the tone of Crowley's book. Her preface indicates that she is hyperaware of her need to be respectful and objective: "How can outsiders discuss insiders' beliefs with anything like fairness and accuracy" (ix). Thus, I was surprised at how much this book deals with apocalyptism and how little it deals with rhetoric.

The first half of the book, though reading a bit like a dissertation (long sections on ancient rhetoric and long sections on postmodern and poststructuralist theory, which read like literature review chapters, or a defining of the terms chapter, from a dissertation), but I hung in there because I assumed that the set up was heading in the right direction: a detailed analysis about how contemporary hot button issues, issues which divide people who are often not willing to listen, can be addressed by a postmodern twist on contemporary rhetoric. I am not sure Crowley really addresses this. In the final pages of her book, Crowley remembers to speak about rhetoric, giving her readers four quick tips on how to argue with people who will not listen to you: 1) Tell Stories! 2) Turn to Conjecture! 3) Grab the Person's Attention! 4) Acknowledge Values! 5) Disarticulate a Particular Belief!

I don't mean to sound mocking, but these solutions come so fast and so quick that the reader doesn't really come away with a good understanding about how the contemporary liberal thinker should engage another thinker who is unwilling to listen. Indeed, Crowley often sounds as if she admits that the whole endeavor is fruitless. She repeatedly admits that although groups from different sides should respect each other's values, "these are precisely the conditions that fundamentalists (of all kinds) refuse to meet" (196).

In fact, the second half of Crowley's book hardly addresses rhetoric at all. Yes, I found the discussion of LaHaye interesting, though I found it odd that Crowley seemed to only use LaHaye as the figurehead of apocalyptism. Like Kevin, I found the discussion of 9/11 interesting, but I honestly had no idea what larger point Crowely was trying to make.

Oddly, Crowley's book reminded me of the work of Michael Moore. I think I am the only member of the left who doesn't like Moore. I thought that Fahrenheit 911 was a poorly focused film that--like Crowley's book--wasn't sure what it really wanted to say. Crowley, perhaps disenchanted with the George W. Bush years, took a look around her and, like so many of us, didn't like what she saw. Yes, the Bush administration has close ties to Christianity, and for the most part these ties aren't good. And Crowley's original idea is a good one: to look at the current debates that seem to divide people and see if there's a way to bring rhetoric into the mix. But Crowley gets off track, so shocked yet attracted to the world of fundamental Christianity that she loses sight of her project. Toward a Civil Discourse reads like a review of Crowley's research into the far Christian Right, information that has already been written by others. The "new" angle that Crowley wishes to add to the mix--ancient rhetoric, with a twist, as a possible solution--never really takes flight. It's almost as if Crowley forgot what she wanted to write about because she got so caught up in learning about a world she knew little about.

Missed Opportunities?

2007-03-10T17:17:00.000-06:00

As a follow-up to the analyses and critiques Faith, Chad, and others have posted, I think I was let down when Crowley missed opportunities to connect her hyper-detailed examples (the analysis of LeHaye's ouevre, the post-1970's apocalyptist seige of the executive office, the 9/11 conspiracy theories, etc.) to some of her original points (respect, justice, locating possibilities for rhetorical invention, interrupting densely articulated ideologies with equal-yet-opposite emotional attachments, etc.) Of course, such a charge could be leveled against any manuscript (too many examples and too little analysis or synthesis, or "she didn't write it the way I wanted her to"), and this could just be my way of complaining that onesidedness undercuts Crowley's original intentions. Still, when Crowley admitted to revising the anger of her earlier drafts (on Jeff Rice's blog), I was thinking, I'm ok with the anger--I just wish you'd operationalized your thesis as a way of exploring the anger that seems inextricable from civic discourse. As it is, we're left to intuitively (inductively?) connect some of her apocalyptist criticism back to how "we" might find space and leverage in a civic discourse with "them."

For example, Crowley's summary of the arc of characterization across the nine season run of The X-Filesonly leads her to note: "I recount all of this by way of pointing out that during the 1990s a popular television show was so, in part, because its writers touted belief, rather than skepticism, as a superior means of making sense of the world" (171). It would seem that the show was also about continuous and mutually respectful (inevitably romantic) discourse between a scientific community and a quasi-religious mythology involving aliens and, above all, a desire to believe (and characters had inner conflicts as well, Scully the skeptical voice of science was also once Scully the Catholic, if I remember right). Perhaps a better example is the thirteen pages Crowley dedicates to detailing the case for a near X-Files-calibre conspiracy regarding 9/11. I got into pgs. 175-188 the way I got into reading the 9/11 commission's official report, but not for the reasons I think Crowley set out to convey. When she wrapped up this overview--this wild digression I kept waiting for her to "unpack" or reconnect--I was let down to read that the upshot was:

"This plea for full disclosure feels to me like another expression of the liberal hope that if all relevant facts are available, understanding will take place (and justice will be done?). Barring the virtual impossibility of such an investigation being undertaken in the near term, I wonder what full disclosure could accomplish, given that it would necessarily expose either massive incompetence or a profound disregard for duty--not to mention the more repellant possibilities--on the part of both elected and appointed officials" (188).

To be fair, there are other sections of Crowley's text that do connect the apocalypist example to the rhetoric she's promoting. And I liked these sections a great deal. For example, in "Nested Beliefs" (pgs. 142-147), Crowley efficiently moves from suggesting that the deductive model of knowledge espoused by most Christians has God "stand[ing] in the place occupied by the individual subject in liberal thought, and He enters consciousness through the heart rather than by means of sensory experience" to her appropriation of Kintz's "repetition of the same" (and media analysis made famous by Baudrillard, who passed away last week) that leads to emotional attachment to "absolute values," which, in turn, leads to ambiguities being the biggest threat to fundamentalist Christian's "ideology of clarity" (147). This whole section had a clarity--if not, perhaps, a charity--that stemmed from an example that didn't become a screed and a follow-up that expanded her previous argument in a new direction.

Anyhow, I'm hoping these examples highlight what I did and did not like about Crowley's rhetorical strategies in the second half of Toward a Civic Discourse. I see others' points about an increasingly onesided argument, but I guess my frustration (at times) stemmed from missed integration and "teaching moment" opportunities.

* * *

Mind Map Thoughts

2007-03-10T16:53:00.000-06:00

Like Chad, I too had a visceral reaction to the second half of this book. In fact, perhaps why I didn't say more in class was that it was an overwhelming and personal issue. I'll try to address a few concerns here:

In an article entitled “Ethnography or Psychography?” from a book about ethnographic methods in composition studies, Keith Rhodes issues an excellent caution to researchers that I find especially pertinent to Sharon Crowley. He writes that oftentimes in ethnographic study, “The inquiry becomes less a question of 'What is the cultural situation of writing education?' and more a question of What is lacking in these students?' No matter how benevolently this last question is framed, it reeks of early anthropology that looked at the 'deficiencies' of foreign cultures paternally” (28). From examining the the map I made this week, it seems that the sources Crowley is citing discuss the “cultural situation” of evangelical Christianity, but Crowley's analysis seems to be more of a “What's wrong with these people?”

For example, Amy Frykholm's Rapture Culture, an ethnographic study of the readers of the Left Behind books, opens with a moving and candid story about Frykholm's own spirituality, how it conflicts with her feminist views, and her admission that “I could not resolve the tension between my dislike for the books and my appreciation of their readers” (9). James Barr minimizes the impact of fundamentalism by saying that it's more of an “ecumenical problem” of a radical group outside of mainstream Christianity, and that it will have no impact on Biblical scholars and theologians (338). Paul Boyer adds multiple qualifications to the statistics that Crowley unproblematically cites, acknowledging the differing degrees to which a belief in apocalyptism influences one's daily life (2). Susan Harding, in The Book of Jerry Falwell, examines the discourses of witnessing and the “born-again” movement. Overall, I would say these writers are less horrified than fascinated, less repulsed than intrigued. They don't see hegemony – they see complexity (Jeff Rice too criticizes Crowley for missing the opportunity to discuss “rhetorical complexity”) They seem to be talking about real people as opposed to a disembodied discourse.

Another problem evident from the map is who Crowley uses as “examples” of the Christian Fundamentalist movement. Particularly laughable was her portrayal of LaHaye as an “intellectual” -- LaHaye is not a professor, does not publish in academic journals, and perhaps the reason that his non-fiction has sold so badly is that people don't buy his crap. As Jeff Rice points out, he is an entertainer. Crowley fails to recognize real Christian intellectuals. In fact, Crowley fails to recognize the African American fundamentalist community at all – the only people she allows to speak for the movement are rich white men. I assume she ignores this community because although it is apocalyptist, it also works for social justice. In short, it complicates her view of the wildly conservative Christian, so she chooses to ignore it. Oddly, Al Sharpton is praised for his “artful and moving” rhetoric (26), but Crowley fails to see that he too espouses apocalyptist beliefs (are these artful and moving too?). I would say that Crowley sets up a “straw man” argument, except that Tim LaHaye is a straw man. Other examples: Pat Robertson, Bob Jones, Jerry Falwell? (Was Tammy Faye Bakker not available that day?)

Crowley and Fundamentalism

2007-03-10T13:22:00.000-06:00

After last week's class, which I apologize for possibly dragging into the territory of Crowley's emotional tone, I ended up trying to figure out why I'd gotten so worked up about a book whose politics and tenets I basically agreed with. My personal views would be much more closely aligned with Crowley's than with the fundamentalist rhetors in her book, and, it follows, I would like to learn rhetorical strategies that would help me to dissuade them, and to help create the civil discourse of her title.

At some point, I realized that the fundamentalist v. liberal dichotomy that shapes much of the book is exactly what turned me away from fundamentalism, that, as a kid at the height of the grunge era, I learned to tune out arguments centered around the need to convert the wayward to keep them from destroying our version of the world, perpetuated by many of the same fundamentalist rhetors cited in the book. Toward a Civil Discourse doesn't inspire flashbacks :), but it does strive to inspire a sense of urgency about what Court refers to in class as the culture wars, and to do so using the tactics of fundamentalism . . . I think.

Jeff Rice, in his introduction to the blog carnival, discusses the book's "heavy-handed lament" of the strong presence of fundamentalist literature and rhetoric in our media, and Crowley's response to his post makes the distinction between wanting to silence fundamentalist rhetoric and wanting to dissuade the fundamentalist rhetors. She's working to establish a way of persuading fundamentalists to hang up their guns, so to speak, and doing so in ways that, as Donna pointed out, tie ancient and postmodern rhetoric together. The idea of restoring emotion to rhetoric, of framing appeals to passion rather than attempting to divorce it from reason, makes a great deal of sense, and perfectly explains the rhetoric of Crowley's book.

She means for us to feel an urgent call to action, to gird up our rhetorics and head into the public arena, which she sees as threatened by fundamentalist rhetors. Again, I think I agree; my job as a rhetorician is to persuade, and she offers a great technique for doing so: finding the marginalized members of fundamentalist groups, whose sense of disempowerment may keep them from feeling completely locked into the ideology. As a teacher of rhetoric, I wonder how to incorporate Crowley's ideas, aside from stressing to students the need for pathos.

Alternatives to Berlin (Paper Topic)

2007-03-10T09:34:00.000-06:00

My research question: “How do we help students understand their own social constructions?” (Or maybe “What's the best way of helping students understand their own social constructions?”) In short, this paper will (1) discuss Berlin's pedagogical goals (2) show how the stage of the students' intellectual development could inhibit them from carrying out the assignments Berlin poses in Chapter 7's “Codes and Critiques” (or, show why the assignment are too hard) (3) use scholarship on the teaching of ethnography, various ethnographic methods, as well as assignment examples from my thesis on the writing in a Textile and Apparel Management class to show how ethnography can be a viable alternative to meeting Berlin's pedagogical goals.

I begin with an outline of those goals, and a summary of the “Codes and Critiques” class in chapter 7. As I've discussed previously, as much as I believe in the soundness of Berlin's pedagogical goals as outline in the second half of Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures, I see them as much too difficult for first-year composition students. I plan to use William Perry's Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years and Belenky et al's Women's Ways of Knowing to show the intellectual development of college students at the freshman level. To summarize, these books: both posit schemes for understanding college student cognitive development, differing primarily in that Perry focused his study on males and Belenky et al on females. In both schemes, the student begins in a stage Perry terms “dualism” (66) and Belenky et al term “received knowledge” (35). In this stage, the student sees the teacher as an Authority who possesses Truth. It is the student's job to give back the Truth. This is usually where the student is at around their freshman year of college. After this stage, the student is able to move to “multiplicity” or “subjective knowledge” where he or she understands that there are a multitude of opinions with equal value. Then the student achieves “relativism” or “procedural knowledge” where he or she gains understanding of the processes involved in obtaining knowledge, such as using supportive evidence to understand complexities. It is only after the students have progressed through these stages that they are able to achieve Commitments in relativism (“an affirmation of personal values in relativism”), or “constructed knowledge,” where he or she sees is able to clearly integrate external complexities with his or her own views. It is also only at this point that the students can tolerate ambiguity and complexity. Students don't usually achieve this until graduate school or beyond.

What's important to note here is that what Berlin is asking students to do most certainly comes in the later stages of development. My goal is to show how ethnography can be a stepping-stone into the kind of thinking Berlin wants his students to do. I begin with a review of literature on teaching ethnography to show how the pedagogical goals of teaching ethnography are similar to Berlin's: close examination of social phenomena, and observation and analysis of trends and patterns. I also see a research component to ethnographic writing, where students could match up their own findings to books or journal articles. By way of example, I use my thesis project, an ethnography of a textile and apparel management class in which students do two ethnographic projects. I can show the successes students had with these projects as well as the way they described their thinking in completing them. I can also use as examples some fascinating autobiographical assignments coming out of Sociology departments aimed at teaching “the sociological imagination,” or teaching students how social forces bear on their lives.

Essentially, I think that an ethnographic writing project is a lot more fun and significantly less scary-sounding than Berlin's assignments, while preserving their intellectual rigor. I'm still thinking over what kind of ethnography (autoethnography and performance ethnography are options too) or how much ethnography I would want the students to do. I'm also considering crafting writing assignments or a syllabus.

I will bring the works cited page and the map to class.

However Unconscious

2007-03-09T14:49:00.000-06:00

Throughout the book, Crowley qualifies her causality in terms of "if belief in apocalyptist narrative influences the minds of the politicians now in control of our destinies" or "however unconscious" this influence may be or, essentially, while most won't cop to the extremist p.o.v. of the apocalyptism I've defined, I think we all know the secret agenda. . .

This is necessary, of course, so that she doesn't overstate her case. On the other hand, I think it brings up what often happens in those "taboo" conversations in and out of the classroom: the reluctance to completely identify, and thus endorse, any one denomination's theoretical framework. In order to skirt the social taboo, or just to avoid feeling guilty about the extremist ends of one's religion, fundamentalist or otherwise, most have created elaborate "outs" in their discourse on faith (I know I have represented, at times in my life, the very left end of cafeteria-Catholicism).

Students, when asked to articulate their beliefs, often make the qualifying "move" of "I am born and raised a _____, though I definitely do not believe in or espouse all that many ________s do." In the struggle to find agency, craft the idea of our individuality, and avoid being caught in the ethical ambiguities and / or outright hypocracies of "private" faith and "public discourse," we tend to find ways to further deny the "however unconscious" influence of religion (which leads me back to books that examine the rhetoric of race, as mentioned last week in class, and the need to first "out" a discourse before it can be fully examined or critiqued).

Thought I'd go ahead and post this as I work my way through those last chapters. . .hope, as always, it makes some sense. . .

Crowley in the blogosphere

2007-03-05T16:52:00.000-06:00

Last year some blogging folks in rhet/comp had a "carnival" (linked discussion) of Crowley's book. There are several entries I might link to, but this one at Jeff Rice's blog included a number of links to other entries, as well as some discussion by Crowley herself (under a pseudonym).

Court on Crowley Redux

2007-03-05T16:36:00.000-06:00

I've sort of said most of this already, but I'll reiterate and make it more to the points brought up in other posts:

I must have missed something--which isn't hard since 1) Crowley digresses more than I do; and 2) I digress quite a bit, both in speaking/writing and reading. But I didn't see where Crowley either positioned herself above the fray or even hinted that she intended to be objective. On the contrary, she states quite plainly in the Preface that she's doing a hatchet job of sorts, because she feels that Christian fundamentalism is a threat to democracy: "...the more I study apocalypticism, the more intense becomes my desire not only to dissent from it but to warn others of the ideological dangers it poses to democracy" (ix). Crowley doesn't, in my opinion (though that opinion is admittedly not as invested as others), make broad claims against all Christians, but rather is concerned with those who have sought to reconstitute the role of faith in politics--to merge the private with the public (separation of church and state being a fundamental precept of the Constitution, along with the religious tolerance and inclusion that follow).

Crowley's project, as best as I can see so far (and as best as I can summarize it), is to demonstrate why she believes that fundamentalist (and/or apocalyptic) Christianity has become a dominant hegemony in the U.S. and a challenge to the competing "default" hegemony of liberalism; and that the values inherent to liberalism--"freedom, tolerance, privacy, reason, and the rule of law" (5)--"double" as values inherent to democracy, she feels the challenge must be engaged. Crowley feels that liberal rhetoric is ill-suited to engage fundamentalist Christianity, however--or rather, stasis between liberalism and Christian fundamentalism can not be met, or rather that a reformulated rhetorical theory, one that marries a postmodern orientation with rhetorical strategies--both modern and ancient--is better-suited for engaging the new hegemony.

Rather than being "above the fray," I think Crowley's trying to reconstitute the fray--to bring it into stasis--through her own articulation of the fundamental (and fundamentalist) positions--on both sides. She wants to break down the binary, but she also feels that *fundamentalist* Christianity is a real threat to democracy--because it challenges representative deliberation, privileges the collective over the individual, operates through coercion, and does not allow for tolerance or pluralism (again, this is fundamentalist Christianity--and I would posit one can say the same about fundamentalist Islam, etc.). So she's invested in critiquing fundamentalist Christianity, whereas liberalism is merely "exhausted" (my word--or rather, Lyotard's--but not Crowley's).

To maybe bridge the divide that has seemingly crept in even here, I'd like to make an aside. Kevin mentions how Crowley easily could have turned to the poststructuralists she later uses (Derrida, Foucault, Said) instead of Mouffe in her discussion of identity and "the Other"--I had a similar reaction, only the name that came to mind for me was Emmanuel Levinas (his name is absent in Crowley, as far as I can tell--quite a surprise considering how many other names appear). Just to historically orient those who aren't familiar, in the long line of philosophical "begetting" (Nietzshe and Marx beget Althusser and Heidegger; Althusser and Heidegger beget Foucault and Derrida; Foucault and Derrida beget Said and Butler), Levinas fits snuggly between the generation of Althusser/Heidegger and that of Foucault/Derrida. Levinas was fairly influential, himself, in formulating "L'Autre," the modern concept of the radical Other in constituting the Self. Levinas felt that the Other's presence is what articulates one's own ethical role in the world. In "Totality and Infinity" he posits that "L'Autre precisely reveals himself in his alterity, not in a shock negating the Same [the Self], but as the primordial phenomenon of *gentillesse* ["tranquility" or "gentleness"]." This encounter with the Other in alterity (otherness encountered in a binary) articulates for the Same, the Self--even before one can formulate a response--a demand by the Other for engagement, for affirmation or denial. One has a sense of immediate ethical obligation to the Other. It might be interesting--in terms of bridging the divide between theology and postmodernism--tp make a connection between Levinas' ethical position and Crowley's position on rhetoric, that "minimally it requires an advocate to recognize that an opponent has a position on the issue at hand..." (29). (It might be interesting to note, too, that Levinas articulated God as "the inifinite Other").

Concept Map - Crowley

2007-03-05T16:18:00.000-06:00

I think/hope if you click this it'll open up to another page and be much bigger.

Crowley and Stance

2007-03-05T15:02:00.001-06:00

The problem with tackling the assigned rhetoric readings so late in the week is that everyone has already addressed what interested me! Yes, Crowley’s stance is troubling. I appreciated her preface, where she writes, “I see few ways around the divide erected by conflicting belief systems, short of conversion, for an outsider who would analyze the discourse of believers. As a result I worry that in many places in this book I am simply returning the favor of misrepresentation” (x). I took heart in this admission, but as Faith astutely comments, “I spent much of the weekend trapped in an airport, and reflecting on the first half makes me wish that Crowley had spent more of the first half just being honest about her liberal politics and the fact that, as the second half of this book makes clear, she knows little to nothing about real Christians.”

Crowley’s project is an important one, and I actually found myself more interested in issues of ancient rhetoric than the liberal vs. Christian war (though the political climate of the culture does concern me). But not only is Crowley not “above the fray,” as another poster mentioned, she contributes to the fray. Although she takes justly-earned shots at liberals (I am liberal myself), such as a refusal to really listen to opponents and rely all too heavily on fact and reason (Al Gore, during his campaign, seemed like an overeager debate captain who had memorized reams of factoids), she is much rougher on conservatives. Although I cannot honestly pretend to truly place myself in the shoes of an apocalyptic Christian, I do try to read texts from the point of view of a doubting reader. How would a conservative pundit respond to Crowley’s text? How would an educated fundamentalist Christian respond to Crowley? I imagine even the most open-minded of Christians (as others have pointed out, there are plenty of Christians who value epistemology and the questioning of what it means to have faith) slamming Crowley’s book closed. Am I the only one who felt the same way? The information in Crowley’s text feels stacked. She’s much harsher on fundamentalist Christians/conservatives than liberals. Okay, I’ll let my liberal colors bleed through. She should perhaps be a bit harsher on fundamentalist Christians, but did anyone else feel that she didn’t really try all that hard at being somewhat balanced? Is Crowley’s text achieving stasis?

Thus, I appreciated Mark’s mentioning of Michael Moore, a polarizing figure who frustrates liberal-minded me (was I the only member of the left who disliked Fahrenheit 9/11?) Mark writes, “In fact, we know that there are few individuals as polarizing as Michael Moore. He is undoubtedly part of the problem Crowley describes.” Might Crowley, unwittingly, also be part of the problem?

Crowleyism

2007-03-05T14:21:00.000-06:00

Kevin's thoughts, like all of yours, have really helped me to contextualize Crowley's arguments. The political edge to her work is certainly just one aspect of it, even though she's sharpened it and made it impossible to read around. That deliberate step does have the effect of making us uneasy, as Berlin and others have argued that students need to feel, in order to start questioning their value systems and really seeing how socially constructed they are. One system of questioning seems to lead to the other, at least in my own thinking--I think, "man, am I liberal, or fundamentalist, or both?" Then, "where do these values come from?" Partly, though, I follow that line of thought precisely because the rhetorical pedagogues before Crowley have taught me to look for it; as a teacher, if we decide to make our students squirm in their value systems a little, I wonder if I need to indicate that that's precisely what I'm doing, and to make a pedagogical forum where students are encouraged to air their views precisely as they are, to put ideology forward so that we can all interact with each other's, and, most importantly, so they don't feel pressured into the communist party, the church of essentialism :), or any other group.

One part of Crowley's argument (and forgive me if it's been explored already) that seems a little more value-neutral (and, yes, she would say that's impossible), is her writing on fundamentalism, on page 13, where she aligns it with foundationalism, which basically says that every belief system stems fromm an ideological foundation. This seems important because it brings in the question of whether the antifoundationalism she claims, which is a critique of established systems of belief, comes from the same foundation. She points out that critiquing beliefs as nonrational is also fundamentalist, and says that she doesn't do that, which is perhaps arguable. She seems mostly to say that liberals are more open to debate than conservatives, which, even if we agree with this, has to be called into question by her book's own explorations. How open is she to interpreting the rhetoric of those who are clearly her ideological opponents, and doing so fairly? Again, she would argue that "fair" is impossible; she might also say that liberals go closer to it than conservatives.

Crowley, dense articulations, and classroom possibilities

2007-03-05T10:02:00.000-06:00

I thought I'd go ahead and post some other sections of my paper that I left off last night. Although I do touch on the "how biased or unbiased is Crowley?" question in this week's presentation, I mainly focused on how many of her ideas--or Mouffe's ideas as taken from Derrida, Foucault, and Edward Said, who I’ll read from later--could be operationalized a bit. While I’m also interested in questioning Crowley's politics or ulterior motives in presenting her “meta-discourse” or self-reflexive rhetoric (and I really liked the questions raised by Mark and Faith on the last two posts on this board--where does Crowley stand beyond what liberals and Apocalyptists do?), I’m also interested in how some of her rhetoric provides concepts for civic discourse (that is, regardless of where Crowley may head in the second half of the book, I'm picking out some of her rhetorical strategies that could aid in a class discussion, a semiotic analysis of a text, a way to consider how "densely articulated" our own belief systems can be, etc).

I also wanted to add that, having grown up among (1oo's, 1,000's?) of fundamentalist Christians--in the shadow of some of their world headquarters--I would agree with Faith and likely all of you that, yes, there's a wide range of beliefs, motivations, and interpretations of why someone follows the tenets of a denomination. On the one hand, I'm glad I grew up among those who lived a Jesus Camp life and those who felt freer to negotiate what their faith might “mean” and how it might best be practiced. Almost by geographical default, I have many friends who are fundamentalist Christians. Having said that--having over-articulated my ethos claim here--I would disagree with what seems like over-generalization when Faith writes:

“a Fundamentalist Christian would never claim to have beliefs as Crowley defines them: ‘views or attitudes . . . that serve the interests of the believer and/or some other person, group, or institution’ (68). Their focus is on a much larger goal, winning souls for Christ, meaning that their life isn't about them. There's a higher purpose. In fact, living for yourself is just about the worst thing you can do.”

I agree that most “would never claim to have beliefs as Crowley defines them,” but I think Crowley would say that this was conjecture on her part (apt or not) and that, no, most would not openly admit or realize that this was the case, though a lack of admission or awareness would not mean that it wasn’t the case. I guess I’m worrying over the perhaps over-generous way in which you’re characterizing “their focus,” since I fail to believe that all fundamentalist Christians “focus on a much larger goal, winning souls for Christ” and that “their life isn’t about them. There’s a higher purpose.” Having said that, I don’t agree with Crowley when she begins to dwell exclusively on the Christian right as those who show “willingness to distort factual evidence to make ideological points” (168)(nor do I celebrate the over-representation of Christian freak shows in the documentaries I mention in the part of my paper I will get to below). I do share some of your irritation with overly smug, thinly veiled and equally hegemonic portraits from some of The Left (as I now over-generalize). I think we’ve mentioned a mutual interest in (the now defunct?) Studio 60, which would have higher ratings if I weren’t on the road most Monday nights, partly because it's interesting to watch Aaron Sorkin try to provide (self-professed) “fair time” to what he still sees as “The Other” (i.e. his sometimes stock Harriet Hayes character).

At any rate, here is more from what I’ll be talking about, CMAP in hand, when we gather this evening. . . .

* * * *

At times Crowley’s over-reliance on Chantel Mouffe for any discussion of “an identity such as ‘an American’ depend[ing] upon a rigorous exclusion of . . .competing national identities” seemed to over-credit Mouffe, LaClau et al. for ideas of “difference” and “the Other” easily found in Derrida, Foucault, and Said’s Orientalism (1978, 2002) (72). However, Crowley does cite these famous poststructuralists when she focuses on how hegemonic fixing of identities takes on the social (and bodily) incipience of habitus, and how a “densely articulated ideologic” enters the habitus, “explains everything,” and produces “intense emotional responses” that can rarely be countered (79). At this point Crowley suggests that beliefs new to, or less densely clustered with, commonplace ideologies are at least “relatively open to reception” (79). This put me in mind of Jon Stewart’s skirmishes with pundits on “real news” shows such as Hardball. Stewart’s contention is that these shows do not promote political discourse so much as white noise--easy iterations of densely articulated belief systems, a forum for commonplaces, platitudes, poll-tested talking points, and what Crowley might term the “ringing of chimes” to produce “sympathetic vibrations” (78-79).

The more accessible sections of Crowley’s book could be offered to a Jim-Berlin-caliber, uber-FYC course (or what we might just call Honors Comp). Perhaps a discussion of whether or not Crowley is biased in her depiction of the Christian Right could lead to peripheral points of how limited our language is when we try to avoid biased discourse on liberals or conservatives. Certainly, assertions such as “one function of hegemony and ideology is to create identity, to disguise or hide the flow of difference” would spark debate and abound in post-9/11 media examples: Progress for America’s “Because they want to kill us” ad, primetime dramas such as 24 and Studio 60 whose creators claim equal time for the left and the right (72). If nothing else, portions of Crowley’s argument could lead to the meta-awareness of being in a classroom (the Eden where some want us to lead value-neutral discussions) while debating whether or not we can find a space to offer 1) respect and the potential for justice, 2) the awareness and allowance of emotion, values, and beliefs, and 3) opportunities for discourse modeled on “agonistic pluralism” instead of consensus or a “perceived erosion of values.”

S.C. and K.B.

2007-03-05T10:01:00.000-06:00

A lot of what Crowley discusses in Toward a Civil Discourse (particularly chapter 3) reminds me of Kenneth Burke. Luckily for me, Crowley never makes the explicit connection to Burke, and so I have something to blog about. Basically, I think some of Burke’s ideas do a nice job of explaining why and how people act the way they do when it comes to politics and controversial social issues (each the province of symbolic action). I’ve squashed my impulse to spill out everything I know about Burke, and chosen just two ideas that have some obvious implications for the way people deliberate today.

God and Devil Terms Crowley notes the hierarchical nature of values, but according to Burke, or language is hierarchical too. Some words have more rhetorical force than others. Such is the case with God and Devil terms (which were also discussed by Richard Weaver). A God term represents the ultimate good in society (“security”, “freedom”, etc.). Devil terms, on the other hand, represent all that is evil and wrong in the world (“terrorist”, “un-American”). People (ab)use these terms all too often. For instance, a member of school board once accused a teachers’ union of ‘terrorism.’ This is a pretty offensive example, but what should be understood is that the very nature of our language often encourages us to take sides (see Burke’s terministic screens).

Guilt-Redemption-Purification The grand dramatistic cycle also seems to be relevant to Crowley’s discussion, particularly in regard to scapegoating. Basically, human beings have established order, but can’t live by it. Therefore, we experience guilt. The only way to cleanse ourselves of that guilt is through blaming ourselves (mortification) or blaming others (victimage). I really think there is something to be said for our desire to blame and symbolically slay other people and ideas. If this is really our natural inclination, then its no wonder we have so much trouble communicating in ways that aren’t completely polarizing and potentially harmful.

In short, contemporary discourse tends to be polarized and contentious and at the very least, I think Burke provides a vocabulary with which we can explain or describe some of these things.

Hegemony

2007-03-05T08:42:00.001-06:00

I liked Mark's comment about “meta-discourse” -- perhaps that was was irking me about Crowley. It's especially confusing because she makes a good case for the pervasiveness of the hegemony. She seems to address this for liberals, but not for herself: “Thus the beliefs and practices of Americans who are not Christians are nonetheless affected by the hegemonic status of Christianity in this country.” Is she claiming to be outside that then? And if there's at least one smart person outside the hegemony, does that make it not a hegemony anymore?

I see this as related to Crowley's central problem – she represents Fundamentalist Christians as she sees them, not as they would represent themselves (presumably she can do this because she's outside the hegemony). For example, a Fundamentalist Christian would never claim to have beliefs as Crowley defines them: “views or attitudes . . . that serve the interests of the believer and/or some other person, group, or institution” (68). A Fundamentalist Christian would be offended at the mere idea that they were a Christian because they needed to be, just as I get angry when someone says that they “wish” they could be religious because it would “make everything so simple.” Their focus is on a much larger goal, winning souls for Christ, meaning that their life isn't about them. There's a higher purpose. In fact, living for yourself is just about the worst thing you can do. But Crowley defines the group in the way she sees them as an outsider, such as the paragraph where she equates angels with aliens (75).

Crowley, Chapter 2

2007-03-04T23:17:00.001-06:00

The big thing for me in this chapter is Crowley's articulation (a nod to chapter 3) of how rhetoric can bridge the gap between the dominant hegemonies she sees in liberalism and fundamentalist Christianity. My own understanding of rhetorical theory is still too inchoate to see all of the moves Crowley makes, but a big one for me was her discussion of the stasis, a discussion which has--thanks to Dr. Strickland--come up for me a few times already this semester, between readings for this class and 8010. Crowley's use of stasis theory to describe how pro-choice and pro-life advocates ("an instance of the hegemonic struggle between liberalism and fundamentalist Christianity" (28) are essentially talking at cross-purposes ("An ancient teacher of rhetoric would have realized immediately that this disagreement is not in stasis; that is, its participants do not agree on the point about which they disagree, and hence two different and incompatible arguments are being mounted" 28-9). Crowley goes on to assert that "Argument entails the exchange of claims and evidence about a disputed position; minimally it requires an advocate to recognize that an opponent has a position on the issue at hand... [and] argument minimally requires an advocate to acknowledge that his or her claim is controversial" (29). Her point is that "Rhetorically speaking, if stasis is not achieved, each side may generate all the evidence in the world to support its claims and yet never engage in argument" (ibid). Because liberal rhetorical theory does values reason but not faith (37) and because its goal is understanding and not persuasion (41-3), it is ill-suited to encounter, engage and mollify Christian fundamentalism. Crowley summarizes her assessment of liberal rhetoric's ability to this end thusly:

"Like liberal theorists, I believe that if democracy is to thrive, citizens must negotiate their disagreements with one another. However, I part from liberal belief in at least two respects. I reject the claim that disagreements can be resolved solely by appeals to empirically based reason.... Second, I do not expect that full agreement can ever be reached on any issue that concerns a large group of citizens" (44).

She thus turns to "search for other grounds from which to think about political argument" and turns to "premodern rhetorical thinking as a place to begin" (44). Crowley states that "ancient rhetoric has much to offer postmodernity" (45), including the focus on location and contingency and the turn towards language. But "A contemporary theory of rhetoric," Crowley contends, "must do more than revive ancient notions... it must adapt old notions to address contemporary rhetorical situations" (47). Here Crowley marries ancient rhetoric with postmodern concepts to provide "analytic advantage[s] over modernism" (48). Rhetorical arguments circulate within *doxa*, that is, the communal life, and they are contingent and reflexive (reciprocal, as opposed to binary--mutually dependent and mutally constructive), arising out of given circumstances.

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the rhetorical terminology and its application to pomo ideas and thinkers that I'm familiar with (she cites Derrida, Spivak, Foucault, as well as Bordieu)--and I'm not sure if she's successful in her stated aims just yet--but her project has been provacative for me. While her alarmist approach to fundamentalist Christianity (warranted or not, given her position that apocalypticism threatens democracy) has the unfortunate side-effect of overshadowing her approach to engaging (and surmounting?) the seemingly incompatible positions of liberalism and fundamentalist Christianity. Perhaps one of her other works focuses solely on that aspect of her project.

Crowley, Liberal Rhet. Theory, and Jesus Camp

2007-03-04T22:03:00.000-06:00

Ok, I'll admit up front that the following is the early part of the paper I'm handing in tomorrow night in conjunction with my CMAP. I thought I'd go ahead and post it as it touches on some of what Faith, Maggie, and others have blogged about so far. . .

* * * *

In Toward a Civil Discourse (2006), Sharon Crowley attempts, with many qualifications, to describe a rhetoric that can work past the “current ideological impasse” between liberalism and apocalyptism in American political discourse (23). Early chapters are dedicated to recovering rhetorical possibilities long obscured by pejorative, cynical connotations of rhetoric in general. Among Crowley’s contentions is that “rhetoric cannot thrive in politics where open disagreement is discouraged” (21). To this end, she describes a discourse in which liberals must forego insistence on reason being paramount to values (John Locke), emotional connections (Lynn Worsham and Alison Jagger), or “evaluation and commitment” (George Campbell’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776)). Likewise, Crowley does not believe that an a priori insistence on consensus—as an outcome of multi-party democracies, public policies, or, really, any rhetorical situation—is a productive “argumentative goal”: “just relations between and among opponents,” she writes, “are . . . difficult to establish . . . when everyone begins with the knowledge that all positions taken by some or all must be eroded or even forgotten if deliberation is to succeed” (21-22).
Crowley builds much of her argument on a foundation provided by Chantel Mouffe, who also decries consensus-building in efforts to rescue democracy from “the failings of liberalism” and Derridean “violent hierarchies,” and who helps recover the “predominant role of passions as moving forces of human conduct” (18-20). Crowley does expand on Mouffe’s assessment of liberal rhetorical theory by articulating how it banks on the willingness of members of a democracy to argue in a rational fashion, even as it becomes clear that legitimacy was never grounded on rational argument (vs. hegemonic discourse), and that liberal rhetorical theory also demotes values (and agency) to the realm of the individual subject (the way Hugh Blair “advised his students to lay aside their commonplaces” and base arguments on their “native genius”), which poststructuralists have already troubled (35-38). To me, this dismantling of liberal rhetorical theory aids in Crowley’s own self-reflexive rhetoric. Crowley is not an apocalyptist but promises to be charitable in order to model the aidos and dike she is promoting in the sophistic tradition of Protagoras and Gorgias; however, she often admits the near impossibility of this while describing the apocalyptist “camp” vs. the liberalism that informs her own politics. Her attempts at self-reflexivity also provide a necessary basis for returning doxa from opinions formed and held by individuals to a more “postmodern theory of rhetorical invention” in which “doxa designates current and local beliefs that circulate communally” (47).
Crowley’s narrative becomes more engaging when she traces a sort of Foucauldian archeology of how hegemonic discourse positioned Americans as a briefly united “we” in the wake of 9/11 and how liberal democracy privatized values and emotions to the realm of the individual while elevating reason to that of public discourse. Her argument is also well-served by repeatedly defining Aristotelian rhetoric as a search for all available means of persuasion. Crowley does run the risk of constructing a straw man out of the tent show end of fundamentalism, but I found that her continual positioning of liberal thought as equally if oppositely hegemonic—an emanation of our habitus that is difficult to “not think” in terms of—did temper the easy one-sidedness to which her book might have succumbed. I also found myself generating more connections to the ways in which liberal thought lacks aidos as it constructs the Other, especially in recent documentaries like Ewing and Grady’s Jesus Camp (2006) and Friends of God (2007), which was directed by Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, Alexandra. Both films have drawn criticism for over-representing the extreme: for focusing on kids praying at camp with a cardboard George W. Bush, or, in the case of Pelosi’s film (described by HBO as “a look at the many millions of evangelical Christians who have become a formidable force in our culture and our democracy”), for lingering on the Christian Wrestling Federation.

* * *

Going Meta

2007-03-04T21:45:00.001-06:00

Crowley describes an interesting problem in America today. People can’t even begin to decide what they are arguing about, let alone find a “civil” way to argue. I think there are a lot of ways for the very people who are in the center of the destructive discourse to pretend like they are not part of the problem. One interesting maneuver is the meta-move.

For instance, Thomas Frank is cited in Toward a Civil Discourse because he has something to say about hegemony. Indeed, his book, Whats the Matter with Kansas?, is concerned with hegemony and how social/moral issues such as abortion have gotten the attention of so-called red-staters so that they now vote for conservative Republicans (against their own economic interests). But Frank is as much a pundit as an analyst. Socially and economically, he presents very “liberal” arguments. However, because he removes himself from the discourse just enough to comment on it, he could probably claim that he is not part of the problem Crowley has defined. It’s a really interesting sort of metacommunicative move.

Perhaps a more obvious example is Michael Moore. He’s stated in Dude, Where’s My Country? that “Horatio Alger Must Die.” He has lamented that people have been deceived into voting based on their aspirations and not their current economic circumstances. He too tries to stand outside the situation in order to comment and define it. He communicates about the communication. Therefore, it would seem unlikely to his readers that he could also be part of the communication. In fact, we know that there are few individuals as polarizing as Michael Moore. He is undoubtedly part of the problem Crowley describes.

“Going meta” (as it was called by Herbert Simon in a QJS article) allows a speaker/writer to step outside or above a context and therefore look as though they are above and beyond the fray. I think all pundits and social/political commentators probably do this – O’Reilly, Hannity, Franken, etc. These commentators break down an opponent’s remarks everyday in order to tell their audience what’s really going on in particular comment or decision. I think it’s a phenomenon that’s really interesting, and also hard to describe, especially in the context of Crowley’s discussion. Sure, the meta-move is probably just another strategy for advancing a particular ideology, but it’s interesting that these rhetors also claim to know how these ideologies work. In fact, if we accept Faith’s interpretation, it would seem that Crowley is guilty of this herself.

Crowley's Rhetoric

2007-03-04T18:37:00.000-06:00

What I thought when reading Crowley was that she's using Berlin's tactic of foregrounding ideology, and giving a strident political focus to her discussion of rhetoric. In this, she seems to be using the approach that she criticizes the fundamentalist rhetoricians for, and I'm not sure whether that was deliberate, and think maybe it wasn't. Her idea that the liberal and fundamentalist rhetoricians are coming from fundamentally incompatible viewpoints seems like a starting point for a discussion of how their rhetorics operate. In her discussion of their operation, she carefully notes where liberals have been more willing to engage the other side than conservatives. So the editorializing intertwines with the scholarship, which, again, fits with the idea that putting ideology out front is the most honest thing to do, so that any political goals can be seen by the students and accepted, or not.

The question that Crowley's use of this tactic brings up is one that the article we read last week got me thinking about: how much does revealing ideology, and political goals, help to promote an honest discourse, and how much does it inhibit the audience, and subvert any potential openness. Crowley comes at us with revolution in her eye, then intersperses discussion of the nature of rhetoric, and I, as a reader, end up skimming toward anything that doesn't seem like mudslinging.

Do you guys think this is deliberate? Does she have a goal on the level of rhetorical pedagogy? I don't really know.

Crowley

2007-03-04T10:57:00.000-06:00

The funny thing here is I am a Christian and I do not see what Faith sees in Crowley's work. I am, however, extremely different in my sense of morals and views from those Crowley is talking about. I didn't think she "lumped" all Christian's together in one category, since she was very specific to define Apocalyptists. I find what she has to say quite important, and very perceptive.

I think her argument goes to the way people of differing value systems and beliefs, even among Christians, makes it difficult for true arguments to evolve. Crowley states, "That is to say, argument minimally requires an advocate to acknowledge that his or her claim is controversial. Ethically speaking, if participants in a dispute do not formulate the position about which they disagree, the necessary respect for an other may not be in play, and neither the conduct nor the outcome of the argument may be just" (29). It is the ability to argue, discuss, and respect the views of others I believe she is talking about. It is difficult to argue with one who is so extremely tied into a system of beliefs that ideas and concepts unlike their own are unacceptable. Respect of those opinions is what is necessary, and beyond that the ability to speak up despite the disrespect that may thrown the way of those who choose to speak up.

I think, and I could be wrong, that what Crowley is getting at is the fact that reason within argument will not work within a very passionate argumentative setting. We need to learn to "use" emotion along with reason in order to invoke a more powerful argument. I do not think that Crowley is simply stating that all Christians are unable to see more than one point of view, but there are those who aren't able to do so, and that using passion as a part of their argument they have become extremely influential and difficult for "reasoning" liberals to argue with. I think it's a good point.

Crowley, Vomit, etc.

2007-03-04T09:57:00.000-06:00

I visited the Univ of Louisville this weekend, and a graduate student there who was working with the brilliant Min-Zhan Lu told me that after reading one of his papers, Lu made him write out all his politics so that they wouldn't seep into his writing. She called this a “vomitory.” I felt as thought I wanted to see the vomitory of Sharon Crowley. I've read the second half of this book,because I spent much of the weekend trapped in an airport, and reflecting on the first half makes me wish that Crowley had spent more of the first half just being honest about her liberal politics and the fact that, as the second half of this book makes clear, she knows little to nothing about real Christians, outside of what she's read in a few books. Crowley takes a diverse and dynamic community and turns them into a cavalcade of the bizarre, extrapolating their beliefs from those of extremists (like LaHaye) whom she then uses to vilify. This is akin to making judgments about homosexuals from the beliefs of child molesters. All of this without ever actually conducting any interviews or empirical research on what Christians actually believe. I'm not convinced that Crowley has ever actually spoken to a Christian – rather, she sets up a Fundamentalist Bogeyman, about whom she must warn the Heroic Liberals to Save the Discourse (I'm thinking particularly of her alarmist discourse on 11). Crowley justifies these sweeping generalizations by saying that they are the “hegemonic discourse” -- I guess this gives her the right to characterize Christians however she chooses. I'll save specific criticisms for next week, but I mention this now because I'm interested in how other folks see Crowley as positioning herself in this half of the book.

Crowley, Chapter 1

2007-03-03T22:24:00.000-06:00

SO much to say about this... I'll run out space.

Where was this book a couple of weeks ago? In 8010, we had a nice discussion about whether or not there are just some issues that one can not argue productively. Abortion was a salient example, of course, and implicit in that was the old yarn about not arguing about politics or religion (abortion is arguably *the* intersection between the two in a Venn diagram of American politics, with same-sex marriage closing in on it in recent years). Yet here is Crowley picking up that very concern in Chapter 1: "On (Not) Arguing About Religion and Politics," where she explains why this has become the case and why she believes it's a threat to democracy (I tend to agree). The main concern Crowley addresses here: "this moment in American history... a discursive climate dominated by two powerful discourses: liberalism and Christian fundamentalism" (2). While I'm not sure how successful Crowley will be in her goal to valorize rhetoric as an anodyne for the schism between the dominant hegemonies she sees in liberalism and apocalypticism, she sure knows how to turn a phrase. There are pages in my copy where there are more underlined lines than not.

While I don't agree with everything Crowley says, one gift she has, in my opinion, is an ability to write thick description--she really articulates for me several observations that I have myself internalized, but never put into words. She puts nicely something I was trying to say last week when she asserts that "Liberalism is the default discourse of American politics because the country's founding documents, and hence its system of jurisprudence, are saturated with liberal values" (3), which are, "According to Anthony Arblaster... freedom, tolerance, privacy, reason, and the rule of law" (5). I agree with that assessment, as with the (not controversial) view that the "Right" (excuse the simplification) has "achieved astonishing results" both in elections and in "morphing... the term *liberal* itself" (6). I think she's on to something, too, when she posits that one of main points of contention between the two hegemonies she constructs is that liberalism, because it values "individual rights, equality before the law, and personal freedom" thus "has little or nothing to say about beliefs or practices deemed to reside outside of the so-called public sphere" whereas "fundamentalist Christians" (that term can be a point of contention) "aim to 'restore' biblical values to the center of American life"--both public and private. Thus the "central point of contention" between the two hegemonies "involves the place of religious and moral values in civic affairs: should such convictions be set aside when matters of state policy are discussed, or should these values actually govern the discussion?" (ibid). The "conceptual vocabulary" of liberalism was a hegemony because it historically has gone without saying, but this "version of Christian fundamentalism, driven by apocalypticism, is in hegemonic contention with liberalism because it motivates the political activism of the Christian Right" and that this challenge has been largely successful, " rendering "the terms and conjectures of liberalism available for examination and possible rediscription" (5). In other words, liberalism has been the default position (though it's rife with its own problems--including its being situated in reason, a situating that excludes engagemente with any discourse that is not so situated); implicit in liberal discourse are many of the values intrinsic to democracy; the challenge to liberalism by Christian fundamentalism thus is largely a challenge to those democratic principles.

I think Crowley does a nice job of summing up who exactly it is that she's implicating in her construction of Christian fundamentalist hegemony, though she takes a while to get there (relatively speaking, considering how many people she probably lost on the way in): "The variety of Christian belief that I'm interested in here typically flourishes among conservative Protestants called 'evangelicals' or 'fundamentalists'" (7) and by fundamentalist, she borrows William Connolly's definition: "a general imperative to assert an absolute, singular ground of authority; to ground your own identity and allegiances in this unquestionable source; to define political issues in a vocabulary of God, morality, or nature that invokes such a certain, authoritative source" (12). Both liberalism and Christianity can be fundamentalist, as any belief system which is foundational in nature can be. Here Crowley makes a nice move in stating that "Ideological foundations are exclusive only if they are taken to be noncontingent--that is, if they are taken to apply nonconetextually or universally"; that "hence antifoundationalism is not coherent unless it is read as a critique of belief systems that posit universal or noncontingent foundations"; that is to say those belief systems that Crowley, using Elizabeth Minnich describes them: "take a given starting point as universal" and so "must also assume that any being whose subjectivity is not legitimatized by that starting point is of secondary or lesser worth"; as Crowley, summing up Minnich, puts it deftly, "When a metphysics informs a politics, those who are marginalized by its foundational ideal or ideals can be constructed by policy as invisible or worse, as worthy of subjegation and defeat" (13). Crowley disagrees with Minnich that antifoundationalism is a "rational position," positing that it is instead "an ethical preference" (ibid). This discussion reminded me of a description of postmodernism--that it is "nothing if not an ethical position" (Robert Eaglestone, in _The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, page 182).

I was puzzled, though, by the lack of discussion of the term *neoconservative* here, a discussion which would seemingly dovetail nicely with her discussion of the conflation of religion and politics and her contention that "during the 1980s... interpreters of biblical prophecy modified the apocalyptic narrative in order to suggest that political involvement was necessary in order to hasten the advent of the end time" (8). She includes a note following that line instructing the reader to "see chapter 4" but my scanning of it was for naught and when one turns to the index, the only listing for "neoconservative" is from one of the endnotes--it contrasts neoconservatism with *paleoconservatism* but it sums up the former as "economic and nationalistic conservatism" without any discussion of how the term can be productively related to Crowley's discussion--namely, that *the* central issue of much neoconservatist screed has been national policy towards Israel (and that any one who criticizes neoconservatism or indeed even uses the term is often labled an ant-Semite) with a reconcilation between those architects of neocon policies who are indeed Jewish with those who are fundamentalist Christians, including those involved in the Project for the New American Century and the current President of the United States. The term itself is controversial, as is linking it to national policies toward Israel, but the subject itself *is* relevant to her discussion of theonomy (see the links below for a more intelligent assessment):

http://www.slate.com/id/2137208/
http://www.slate.com/id/2160462/

I'm interested to see how she develops her contention that rhetoric is better-suited than liberalism for engaging "apocalypticism"--she uses broad strokes in asserting that rhetoric "does not depend solely on appeals to reason and evidence for its persuasive efficacy" and that rhetoricists understand "the centrality of desires and values to the maintenance of beliefs" while liberalism is based on reason and leaves little room for beliefs not grounded in it (4). Rhetoric, she contends "will work better in the present climate than liberal argumentation because it offers a more comprehensive range of appeals, many of which are considered inappropriate in liberal thought" (ibid) and how she'll develop Mouffe's "agnostic pluralism" (I've ordered Mouffe's book), which has as its "prime task" not the elimination of passions from the public sphere but intead the mobilization of "those passions toward democratic designs" (22).

Rhetoric and Fundamentalism

2007-03-02T15:17:00.000-06:00

I haven't gotten quite through all three chapters yet, but what I've read so far has certainly peaked my interest. I think she's so right when she says, "Indeed, to dissent is to risk being thought unpatriotic" (1). It seems for a number of years that we only hear from one side. There's been a lot said on the issue of abortion, but it has been fairly one-sided. She goes on to say, "Discussion of civic issues stalls repeatedly at this moment in American history because it takes place in a discursive climate dominated by two powerful discourses: liberalism and Christian fundamentalism" (2). Liberals tend to battle with reason, and the Fundamentalists with fire and passion. Somehow that fire and passion has outwitted the reason, and I believe Crowley is saying that is because reason doesn't fight on the same level as passion. She talks about deeply held beliefs bonding tightly with the bodies of believers. Next to that the cerebral approach is cool and perhaps less effective. I know when I firmly believe something it's easier to simply let fly than to try to reason through my argument.

I also began wondering about this in relation to something we discussed this week in a rhetorical criticism class, that being Fantasy Theme. I don't know that it exactly fits, but there are certain elements here. The fact that the fundamentalists all hold to one belief, and that belief is the only important fact. Any other information is pales in comparison to this belief system. It also made me wonder about Hitler. Yeah, I said Hitler. Think about it, he was one hell of leader who was capable of pulling people together under one belief: that they were better than the rest of the world. If I believed that I was "saved" and that meant I would go to heaven when all others would go the opposite direction, I could believe that I, and my ideals, were superior to others. There is something very compelling about considering yourself a part of an elite group. The larger the group grows, the more strength they gain.

Cowley brings in rhetoric as a device by which others can once again join into a more diverse conversation about politics. She states, "But as I have said repeatedly, rhetoric does have a major advantage over liberal strategies of argument insofar as it is able to address ideological and emotional claims as well as rational ones" (23). This is an idea that I like. How else does one make a point in a highly emotional argument, but with an emotional appeal. Perhaps we should mix a little emotion in with our reason in order to be heard.

Good book, good points.

Hoax Aftermath

2007-02-27T10:59:00.000-06:00

Brief follow-up. . .

It's hard not to connect this morning's headlines (Scorsese, Britney and that war are so five minutes ago) with last night's discussion. Likely, everyone has already seen the UNC "Break Up" video on YouTube (I always assume I'm the last to get a viral video infection), but, if not, it's easy to locate (it rose to the top!). The vague implications of its creator--"the power of internet companies" and the "amount of money companies make from them"--are what I wanted to offer up this morning:

* * *

YouTube Breakup Is a Hoax
AP
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (Feb. 27) - The Valentine's Day breakup of two North Carolina college students that featured singers, hundreds of spectators and a profanity-laced tirade was a hoax after all.

Ryan Burke confessed Monday that the confrontation, which became an instant hit on YouTube.com, was all a stunt to show the power of Internet communities and the amount of money that companies make from them. The pair weren't even dating.

The fake breakup garnered plenty of attention, including more than 747,000 hits on YouTube, where users post video online, and local and national media coverage.

"The fact that actual news agencies are interested was a surprise," Burke told The Charlotte Observer. "We did think it would get some media attention but not from those outlets (like newspapers)."

Last week, Burke, 22, claimed he and Mindy Moorman had been dating for four months but that he broke up with her because of alleged infidelity. He attracted a crowd by promoting the event on the social networking Web site facebook.com., and hundreds of students and several photographers were among the spectators at a popular gathering spot on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus.

When Moorman, 21, arrived, an a cappella group sang the Dixie Chicks hit "I'm not Ready to Make Nice."

When Burke dumped her, Moorman's response was an angry rant filled with expletives.

Moorman, a sophomore at North Carolina State University in nearby Raleigh, said she didn't expect such a big reaction. "No, never, never, ever," she said.

Moorman's only regret: She cursed too much.

* * * *

A Rhetorical Passion

2007-02-26T17:18:00.000-06:00

Yes, I have a thing about "passion" being an aspect of what people do. Therefor, I am thrilled with Rosa Eberly's ability to be passionate about rhetoric without taking herself too seriously. Well, that and the fact that she is right.

She talks of rhetoric as being the means of being citizens together. What an odd thought, being citizens motivated to work together to achieve a common goal. Perhaps we talk about it a lot, but let's face it, we don't really believe in it. She states, "And given the growing sense that our democracy is composed of deliberating bodies that no longer know how to deliberate, of publics that can imagine themselves as nothing other than consumers, and of leaders who hold in contempt the idea that democracy requires information to be held in common. . ." (Eberly 5). The things we are reading make me think a great deal about teaching, and what that means. One minute I'm unsure of what should be taught (how political, or how controversial) and then I read this and I'm thinking I should teach simply to engage the students in a conversation about something real.

If students begin to understand the power of a well written or spoken piece, perhaps we could engage them further in the practice of writing.

Hmmmph.

Random Thoughts

2007-02-26T00:18:00.001-06:00

Some random thoughts…

I appreciate how Hauser specifically connects rhetoric to the political. In this sense, Hauser’s chapter connects well with the Berlin book we just finished. How do opinion polls function as rhetoric, speaking for the public when the public remains largely separated and silent? For Hauser, a democratic government interested and open to change requires an involved and diverse public voice, but sadly, “we [. . .] must overcome the menace of difference that provokes distrust and the antidemocratic rhetorics of intolerance [. . .]” (10). Hauser also recognizes the social in ways similar to Berlin: “For democracy to be a functional form of government in a society of strangers, citizens must learn how to engage difference in a way that recognizes the individual and the group as a subject” (emphasis added) (10). Later, Hauser cautions against viewing the individual as separate from the social: “Subjectivity is not entirely a function of the self-contained individual. It also involves identity, which is inseparable from the social groups with which the individual identifies [. . .]” (10). Hauser also echoes the postmodern sentiments (though I’m not sure if Hauser uses the term “postmodern”) of Berlin, calling for a rhetoric open to change, a rhetoric that is not slavishly indebted to “the Athenian legacy” (3). Thus, Hauser’s chapter is radical in a quiet way. Anyone have ideas what Hauser’s radical, open-to-change, and social rhetoric might look like?

Gronbeck’s chapter nicely follows Hauser’s, as Gronbeck is especially interested in cyberculture and its potential for new rhetoric, a reconceptualiz[ation] of ‘political activity’” (18). He views—and I agree—the Internet as a powerful tool to take rhetoric out of the hands of those who hold power. However, I am not sure that I agree with Gronbeck’s fear of ultratargeting. Who is to say that accessing the Internet to read everything that one can about—to use Gronbeck’s example—abortion will necessarily lead to “driv[ing] other issues out of the electoral decision-making process”? (26). Finally, I would have liked to hear Gronbeck speak more specifically about rhetoric. His section titled “So What’s a Rhetorician to Do?” seems aptly titled.

Logan’s historical overview of the ways in which women of color have used identification and resistance as rhetorical devices is fascinating, but I was again wondering why this chapter didn’t push further. What is Logan’s advice or proposal for now, for the future? Did anyone else feel that this chapter didn’t really go beyond historical analysis?

Eberly’s piece isn’t shy about bias. She is not interested in adopting a neutral persona, as revealed in her President Bush jab: “Is the President an idiot?” (46). The President is an idiot, of course, but this line—among others—made me wonder about the sides we take in rhetoric. Hauser briefly addressed the problem of sides—binaries—when he suggested that opinion polls reduce complex issues to either/or thinking. I felt a bit lost in all the –ike discussion, so I hope that we can clear this up in class on Monday. I sensed that Eberly is arguing for rhetoric to be freed from its –ic-ike-ness because “Plato’s –ike ending removed from rhetoric’s reach politics, ethics, teaching, and discursive studies [. . .]” (49).

Finally, I thought about Mark while reading Simons’ chapter. Simons addresses public speaking, which was fascinating, since as we have said in class, rhetoric books oddly leave out public speaking a lot. However, I did have the feeling that Simons’ chapter was little more than an in depth explanation of TIF and how great it was. Did other people feel the same way? Perhaps Mark saw some “bigger picture” ideas to take away from this chapter. I was left with two impressions: TIF is awesome, and we should all try to implement a TIF-like forum.

Issues Forums and Engaging Civic Discourse

2007-02-25T22:19:00.000-06:00

Drury, where I live that other life most days of the week, has a Convo series that also influenced Drake, which is mentioned as being inspired by Temple's model for campus forum debate. In the early days, our Convo speakers seemed to be nomadic academics who brought their traveling medicine show of specialties across the midwest (See the Post-Colonialist and What He Has to Say About Joe Conrad! See the Third Most Cited Voice on Late Abstract-Expressionism!). Since 9/11, our series has become more of a civic-minded public forum for debating the "issues" that students (freshman must attend) will analyze for the rhetoric, philosophy and "American Experience" portions of their year-long FYC course.

This year, naturally, the theme has been "Liberty and Security in a post-9/11 World" and the local media has taken great interest in tallying the (perceived) red or blue nature of our famous and obscure rhetors, which have included Col. Janis Karpinski sharing her first hand account of Abu Ghraib and Eric Posner's thesis that the Geneva Convention may not have relevance for the conduct of the global war on terror.

In this week's readings Herbert Simons writes that "my reckless bias is for TIF itself, and for its commitment to a certain vision of the university as a site of public controversy. . ." Our vice president for academic affairs, who holds a Ph.D in rhetoric, has recently had to enter the public discourse in the form of an op-ed piece in the local paper. I should back up and relate that Cindy Sheehan is scheduled for Theme Day (the uber-Convo experience, a day of debates in leiu of "regular" class meetings) in which she will "publicly debate" Col. Michael Meese. Many in the media--and local letter writers--believe that Drury originally contracted Sheehan and then, after her recent brushes with the law and Dick Cheney, "added on" the presence of the "Right" by asking Meese to come too. However, to my knowledge both were always on the bill. Anyhow, in a Simons-like statement, Dr. Taylor writes:

"In an age in which the quest for understanding is too often subjugated to the politics of demonization or, worse yet, to an insular silence on controversial ideas, institutions of higher education have a special calling to promote — and to insure — the free and open exchange of opinion on issues of public importance. Drury University's annual convocation series embodies the university's larger historic commitment to providing a platform for provocative ideas, as we celebrate the process of 'knowledge in the making.'" Later, in the same piece, he adds: "This day is about understanding the scope and function of dissent. In a sense, this is what colleges do every day; we engage the ideas and beliefs of people we don't understand, occasionally celebrate, and sometimes detest. We do this not because all ideas are of equal merit, but because all people are of equal worth. As such, we seek out dissenting views because they test our assumptions and affirm the importance of informed and engaged deliberation on matters of public significance."

I just wanted to note that that conception of the liberal arts university is still hotly contested, and largely due to this question of "engaging" the community as to the "scope and function of dissent." Interestingly, though, this conception itself has stirred many to write opinions to the editor--enabling civic discourse even among those who feel it isn't our place to "promote" certain political viewpoints.

On a completely unrelated note, Maureen Stapleton just flashed on the screen beyond my laptop as part of the "in memoriam" montage at the Oscars. The clips they lingered on for Stapleton? That's right, Mark: her portrayal of Emma Goldman in 1981's Reds.

See you soon and sorry for leaping in with Crowley in my previous post.