So Pat Bizzell opened the lunch banquet by striding slowly into the hall preceded by a be-kilted apparently genuine Texan Scottish bagpiper wailing away. Everybody instantly shut up. She walked up to the podium, cleared her throat, and said: “Can I have your attention please?”
Lester Faigley began his presentation, “Rhetorics Fast and Slow”, with some humor as well, and then moved into a discussion of the 2000 presidential election as evidence that rhetorics and institutions move at different speeds, with his primary example being CNBC’s split-screen that showed the up-to-the-minute performance of the Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P 500 on one half, and the Florida electoral college outcome frozen for weeks. There are fast rhetorics and slow rhetorics, said Faigley, and fast rhetorics dominate our world: email, cell phones, and images have won out over the carefully reasoned paragraph, the carefully subordinated and hypotactic argument, Plato’s dialogic path towards understanding. The proliferation of digital technology has accelerated the flow of information, the movement of capital, the growth of individualism.
The digital divide is one of speed: those who travel fast and light dominate those who travel slowly and are tied to a single mode. (Hmm: I’m not so sure, since this seems to elide other aspects of the digital divide, and also ignore the plight of subjugated immaterial labor.) More information seems to have led to less understanding. Global networking is a tool of capitalism and propaganda and banal convedrsations, and interactivity is nothing more than an echo chamber, with words not so much exchanged as bounced around, bounced back and forth. The glut of information has led not to increased understanding, but to confusion, fragmentation, exhaustion. This is fast rhetoric, and fast has overwhelmed slow: before, information was scarce; now, filters for information are scarce.
But going faster and faster, Faigley noted, leads to accidents. Changes in attitudes about slavery came about through debates in slow rhetoric. As Gerald Hauser demonstrated in his talk on the moral vernaculars of Dietrich Bonhoffer, Vaclav Havel, and Nelson Mandela, slow rhetoric allows dreams to be articulated, and slow rhetoric is what we — as rhetoricians — do well. The fate of future generations will depend on how well we can teach our students slow rhetoric.
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