Rhetoric

Declamation and the Digital

preterite Computers, Rhetoric, Writing

In Lester Faigley’s “Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal” (CE October 1986, 527-542), this analogy stopped me:

In organizations where computer technologies have become commonplace, people have taken advantage of opportunities for horizontal communication on topics of their choice through computer ‘bulletin boards,’ which function like radio call-in programs. (538, emphasis mine)

It’s an early metaphor, certainly, and a notion that’s been addressed in various ways in our nascent literature about writing and blogging. But I love the shift there, the look to older technologies, and the way we understand those older technologies today as the domain of an apoplectic Rush Limbaugh or a low-key Tom Ashbrook. (No offense, Tom: I like your show a lot. But NPR, as the smart counter to Rush, sometimes tries too hard to make its programming chamomile-tea mellow and inoffensive.) Usenet as late-night call-ins from the cranks and tin-foil hat crowd.

Blogs, of course, have been widely represented as the same, and I hope we’re past that now. But what about the aspect of declamation? What about the late-night crank phone call to the radio station where the listener offers a half-hour raving systematization of gray aliens, the Zionist Occupational Government, black helicopters, man-hating bra-burning feminists, the United Nations, and the general incompetence of teachers of writing?

What happens if we understand those as instances of Seneca the Elder’s suasoriae and controversiae in the context of their relation to the hegemonic force of mainstream discourse? As, in fact, counterhegemonic uses of genre that in their deployment of genre serve to either (1) indict the way that discourse functions under an oppressive regime or (2) praise the operation of discourse under that regime, depending on who’s reading.

No answers. But I keep coming back to that Faigley quote as a moment of interesting rupture. Its juxtaposition of qualities and modes.

Why We Need Tacitus

preterite Composition Theory, Rhetoric, Rome

The recent Kairos Call for Webtexts has me interested. The CFW says, “we focus on the connections between classical Greek and Roman rhetoric and contemporary digital communication” — and yet the CFW’s three examples (Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates) are all Greek.

Composition doesn’t like the Romans, and especially not the Romans under Empire. (In our disciplinary literature, though not in Classics scholarship, Quintilian gets a pass for his collusion with brutality.) And I wonder whether seeing the rhetorical impulses of a massively powerful and deeply conservative agrarian world power makes teachers uncomfortable. The Greeks were about knowledge; the Romans, power. Questions of true and false versus questions of right and wrong. With such polarities, of course the Sophists might seem like more appealing allies with which to rhetorically align ourselves.

But if you look at Roman rhetoric under the stresses of imperium, you start to see a much more significant connection to the way words work in the world today. You start to see Leo Strauss as the contemporary theorist of the vicious and amoral Roman delatores, and the hopeful rhetoric of the Greek Sophists as an ultimate instantiation of contemporary critical relativism — and perhaps a reason why rhetoric as theorized in relation to power functions differently from rhetoric as theorized in relation to knowledge.

So what might we learn from imperial Rome contra democratic Greece? First: the Sophistic privileging of knowledge (and today as it functions in composition) is naïve under imperium. Like the later Romans — like Tacitus, like Juvenal, like Pliny, like Plutarch — we need a discourse that concerns itself with rhetoric’s relation to power. American rhetoric today carries an impulse towards stripped-down forthrightness characteristic of the early rhetoric under Augustus. Certainly, the style of Tacitus is glittering and pointed, breathtaking in its compression (ask any amateur who’s ever tried to translate him and for pages sought a verb), but unique for its time in its elisions. Most other imperial rhetoric carried a style that lectured and hectored and said what it meant, because it was able to, because it held no political importance. The rhetoric of empire was literary, and fraught with epideictic qualities, because — under imperium — it could not be deliberative.

I figure it’s clear where I’m going with this, and the parallel I’m drawing. The problem is just that imperium, now, is distributed and in fact enacted through distributed rhetorics. Could it be, though, that lecturing and hectoring in the American rhetorical mode that privileges so-called “plain speech” is forthright because it’s easy to oppose? What if we use Tacitus to turn Strauss on his head and argue for a difficult political discourse, an ambiguous political discourse, a problem-posing political discourse that asks questions rather than answers them?

NFL Visual Rhetorics

preterite Rhetoric

I don’t much like Fox, but I have to say: they get football right. ABC’s Monday Night graphics muddy up the bottom half of the screen, and CBS is even worse in its Sunday coverage that places silly 1998-style brushed-metal medallions and bars over all corners of the screen — but Fox, with its use of translucency and a single top-of-the-screen bar or icon gets it right.

Beyond that, though, the cinematography angle fascinates me. CBS is clearly the most naturalistic, doing the least image filtering of the three networks, and their CGI projection of the first-down line seems almost embarassed in its self-effacement. ABC’s Monday Night franchise this year is sort of in the middle, with some obvious on-the-fly video image enhancement in its balancing of black and white levels, and I can’t tell how much sharpening they’re doing. But Fox: man, Fox is shameless, and I can’t help but love them for the way in which they’re spinning the game into sheer spectacle, almost to the point where it might as well be a video game. Compare a Fox game to a CBS game: visually speaking, what you see from Fox is (1) an equalized image adjustment, heightening the strong blacks and strong whites in any image, reducing the range of lightness values and so increasing the contrast, (2) a posterization of color values, so that similar hues merge into one another, and (3) a sharpening of edges, so that differences in color and hue and value seem more sharply defined.

The net result? The NFL on Fox is far easier to follow in the way in which they dumb down all of the information that the game presents. And that’s a good thing. So what we’re seeing is something beyond the rhetoric of naturalism: we’re seeing a favorable public visual rhetoric that happily reduces the information available.

A filtered rhetoric.

My Dinner with Terry

preterite Politics, Rhetoric

Last week, Terry Eagleton gave our English department’s annual Troy Lecture on the Humanities and Public Life. It was a great talk, and I was one of the grad students who got invited to come along to the faculty dinner with Eagleton afterwards, which was excellent as well, though I’ll cop to being star-struck and tongue-tied. But Eagleton was charming and funny and brilliant and intensely charismatic, and I’m glad to have gone to both the talk and the dinner, especially since my dissertation work owes so much to the theoretical inheritance — via Eagleton and others — of his mentor, Raymond Williams.

His lecture focused on two terms: terror and tragedy. Terror, of course, in its modern rhetorical deployment as “terrorism,” and tragedy in its literary sense. The term “modern” is essential, according to Eagleton, because terror (as a political idea and a philosophical concept) and modernity are “twinned at birth”: the word “terrorist” was first used by Edmund Burke in reference to the French Revolution, the founding of the first modern bourgeois state. But — of course — in that case, terror was the Jacobin state. As Eagleton put it, “Terror has an impeccable bourgeois pedigree.” He pointed out, as well, that our contemporary rhetorical references to “9/11” have their own predecessor in the September 11 death of Salvador Allende in the coup d’etat that installed General Pinochet and Milton Friedman’s Los Chicago Boys 28 years earlier. (Yes, again with the economics — but with Eagleton, the first and second Paris Communes, Friedman, and Chile, how could it not be?)

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The Preterite Proletariat

preterite Composition Theory, Rhetoric

I hadn’t realized how busy I’ve been, but looking back and seeing that I haven’t posted in a week — well, I guess I’ve been busy. I’ve kept meaning to respond to the excellent things Clancy and Jenn have had to say about Kelly Ritter’s CCC plagiarism article, but revisions to dissertation chapters, getting the class weblogs going, gearing up for the job search, and prepping two pieces for publication have kinda gotten in the way.

So a quick thought tonight while I’m working on one of those pieces for publication: in his response to my three posts on the Wayne Booth rhetoric carnival Collin Brooke hosted (could that really have been only seven months ago, with John’s comments there and him now gone?), the Happy Tutor scolded me (in his generous and inimitable manner) for suggesting that a rhetoric that said different things to different people could be useful or ethical. My comment was in response to Booth’s caution “that one form of careful listening can produce one of the worst forms of deception. Really skillful rhetors can invent language that is intended to mean one thing to ‘insiders’ while appeasing ‘outsiders’” (121), and I offered in response Shadi Bartsch’s suggestion that “the discourse used before powerful figures, especially on occasions when it had an audience ready and willing to find unstated meanings, could undermine its own contents and the authority of the addressee. The meaning granted a given act, in interactions with emperors or their agents, was not always and not necessarily the sole province of the powerholder” (Actors in the Audience 65). The Happy Tutor wondered whether that wasn’t rather Straussian of me, to suggest that texts could or should be simultaneously (to use Strauss’s terms) esoteric and exoteric; that texts could communicate radically different or even opposite things to different audiences. (My favorite example is Cicero’s Pro Ligario, but Bartsch invokes the Dialogus de Oratoribus of Tacitus as another excellent example, as well as Quintilian’s borrowing from Cato the Elder of the ideal rhetor figured as a vir bonus dicendi peritus.)

And that made me think: Bartsch, Booth, and Strauss. All University of Chicago professors. Is there some institutional habit of thought that turns people at the U of Chicago towards problems of hermeneusis? But more significantly: isn’t this attention to the meaning-behind-the-meaning and the complexities of the hermeneutic unveil — isn’t this exactly the same thing that critical pedagogues purport to do? To show the text-behind-the-text, to help students see how ideology and interpellation truly function in today’s popular texts of advertising and mass media? Doesn’t critical pedagogy necessarily construct an excluded preterite proletariat who may never see the truth of how they are constructed/oppressed by discursive forces, as well as an elite who (having been coached by the insightful academic) speaks the shibboleth and “gets it”? Have left intellectuals like Giroux and Shor made the cultural-studies inheritors of Freire into the inheritors of the arch-conservative Strauss, as well? In sum: has Freire’s ideal of critical pedagogy, through a conception of texts simultaneously esoteric and exoteric, been co-opted into yet another instrument of domination?

I wish Booth would have had more to say on the topic.

Come Together (Bourdieu)

preterite Class (Meta), Economics, Rhetoric

Economists rely on metaphors. Graphs, diagrams, the visual logic of geometry: these are especially favored among neoclassical economists for their explanatory power, even as neoclassical economics has been increasingly critiqued (see, for example, the post-autistic economics movement) for the ways in which these metaphors seem to be better at explaining themselves in a sort of idealized hermetic circle than they are at actually explaining the real workings of the world. Bourdieu, in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, follows the lead of the economists with his graphs, diagrams, and curves (see, especially, pages 17 and 81 for figures that seem to explain more than they truly do): geometry, after all, has a rigor and a logic, and what sociologist would not want to borrow some of that power?

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Class and Visual Rhetoric

preterite Composition Theory, Rhetoric

The new College English came in the mail today, and over lunch at campus, I took a quick turn through Dean Rader’s review article, “Composition, Visual Culture, and the Problems of Class.” My first reaction — which likely indicates that I need to go back and do a more careful reading — was that it made me a little grumpy. While I entirely agree that it’s “essential to see all manner of texts as valid objects of inquiry” (650), I’d assert — on a first, quick read — that “the connections” Rader perceives “among rhetoric, visual culture, and social and economic class” (650) are problematic. The two authors that Rader cites who write about “the Problem of Class” are Lynn Bloom and Fredric Jameson — and in the field of composition, that’s distressingly scant, particularly given the poorly researched and self-indulgent class bigotry of the Bloom essay that Rader describes as “thoroughly enjoyable” (640). Such lack of depth leads to the review essay’s more grave difficulty: its not-very-implicit equation (640) of the middle class with textual rhetoric and the working class with visual rhetoric, and subsequent contention (641) that arguments which “privilege the visual over the rhetorical” (do we assume that he here meant “textual” for “rhetorical”?) (641) have a particular class orientation.

There’s also the often-repeated ceci tuera cela argument I’ve griped about before: “visual culture is beginning to supplant print culture” (640). Is there too much culture in the world’s (apparently limited) cultural space? If we see an increase in the traffic of images, do we need to spin open the valves and bleed off some textuality in order to keep the culture pressure from going to condition red? Because most statistics seem to indicate a fairly consistent increase in global literacy.

Finally, there’s the piece’s pedagogical notion — well critiqued by John Walter — that we should teach students this stuff because they’re already skilled at it, because it’s easier for them to do, and because they like it better (638). This is a poor rationale upon which to structure one’s teaching. I’ll reiterate: yes, I wholeheartedly agree on the importance of bringing the composition and analysis of texts in various media and genres into the classroom. But the argument for that importance is one I’m not sure Dean Rader’s review article manages — on the basis of class — to make.

Still, as I said, this is a reaction based upon a first reading, and I hope I might yet be corrected. Clearly, I haven’t here done any close work with the body of Rader’s analysis; it’s simply, rather, that his assumptions about class give me pause, particularly when taken in conjunction with the (already, as he notes, strong) literature in composition on visual rhetoric. Right now, it’s back to Bourdieu, but I know I’ll likely need a break from Pierre at some point soon, so I hope to return to this article.

4Cs: Political Pedagogies, Public Citizens

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Politics, Rhetoric

I was interested in this panel primarily because of the interrogation of the privileging of alleged civic discourse in the composition classroom that its description promised: recall Doug Hesse’s contention that we’ve tamed civic rhetoric into a school genre by having students write about the public sphere rather than in it, and my concern from the Weblogs as Social Action panel that teacherly delight at the possibilities offered by weblogs for political deliberative rhetoric should be tempered by the apparent predominance of dialectical — rather than deliberative — classroom ends to which many teachers are applying weblogs. But it certainly didn’t hurt that my friend and former University of Pittsburgh colleague Chris Warnick was presenting, and that I’ve really come to enjoy the “literary” style (as another former Pitt colleague put it last year) of Pitt CCCC presentations. It’s an interesting split: every panel I’ve seen from Pitt people involves paper handouts for the audience and the presenters reading from a highly eloquent pre-written paper, whereas most panels I’ve seen from the CCCC computer folk have involved presenters talking through bullet points and using a video projector for PowerPoint slides or Web pages. In some ways, it’s almost a split between hypotaxis and parataxis — which is perhaps appropriate, since Pitt’s program carries a deep cultural studies and critical theory influence, and such an influence necessarily lends itself to the careful subordination of hypotaxis and deductive reasoning rather than the and/and/and of parataxis and inductive connections. And I gotta say, when I’m trying to follow along and take notes at the same time, sometimes the rich and complexly subordinated discourse Pitt folks are so good at comes too fast and too smart for me to be able to adequately follow: in between listening, thinking it through, and attempting to quickly render it into my own words, I found I sometimes lost the thread.

Still, I hope the brief summaries and thoughts I offer here might begin to offer at least a thin hint of the panel’s quality. All four presentations more than lived up to the promise of their program description, firmly grounding their formidable theoretical sophistication in careful considerations of the realities of classroom practice.

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What Do Weblogs Do?

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Rhetoric, Writing

I’ve been meaning to respond to Clancy’s post on assessing student weblogs for a while, but in and around reading Wayne Booth and not having fully sorted out my own thoughts on student weblogging, it took me a while to get around to it. I was going to post this as a comment at her place, but it looks like there are some technical difficulties going on over there as I write this, so here goes.

Clancy notes that my post a while back on the Ask MetaFilter thread on life-changing experiences got her thinking about how writing teachers who ask students to maintain weblogs evaluate what their students write. Her considerations of the nature of assessment when applied to weblog writing, while not a response to me :-), offer a lot to think about. Clancy seems to me to make two major points: first, what she thinks the weblog should do, “which is primarily to enhance community in the classroom, but then they invariably end up learning a lot about audience and rhetorical practices by engaging in the conversation, too.” Second, how she evaluates that writing — and it sounds to me like she’s arguing that her grading policy (essentially, just participate) places primary importance on the community-enhancement function, and the latter part — what students learn about rhetoric by engaging in that participation — will come naturally out of the first and needs or bears no evaluation of its own. (Is that fair, Clancy?)

In my own pedagogy, I’m still a little uncertain about what it is that weblogs teach students in the classroom.

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