Wednesday Class: Fun in the Computer Lab

First 15-20 minutes of class

Click link above and log in

Watch video clip. Take notes either on your computer, or with the traditional method (pen and paper. Not stone and chisel.)

Respond for 5 minutes, free writing into your blog space

Watch again, amending your notes when necessary

Revise your free writing into a coherent blog

Read someone else's blog. Make a comment so you all feel loved

Second 20 minutes of class

Pair up with someone new. Work at one computer. (Fastest typer gets the privilege of keyboard control).

Turn to page 270-280, also keep open 402-403.

Go to This Website

Use your knowledge of ethos and pathos, and the "seven" things you need to think about when composing a text (I added more, remember?) to analyze the page. You might choose to focus on one aspect (such as the kinds of audiences or the genre) to make a claim or argument about what the page is doing or how it is doing it. Type up your comments, working together to create at least a paragraph.

Post it to one of your blogs--Mark it as a joint venture. This will not count toward your requirement.

Assignment for Thursday: Read CDA p.329-346

neither/nor

Kennedy, George. Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition.

Primary Rhetoric. Civic Rhetoric. Technical Rhetoric. Philosophic Rhetoric. If we break it down enough times, will we arrive at a definition that would satisfy even the Socrates of Gorgias?
Defining "rhetoric" or "communication" or "oratory" is practically a clichéd move in academia. How many classes have I had in rhetoric which started off asking us, in small groups, to try to write a definition? Each time it happens, I groan a little deeper, feel a little more frustrated, become more convinced that there is no good answer, that every answer is itself a rhetorical move (what does that mean?) meant to fulfill the ontological requirements of a university course. What is it that you're doing in your field?
And we say the word "constructed" as though it's very flimsy-ness could save us.
In Kennedy's history (overview? handbook?), I can see the threads that provide the base of our assumptions, our grounding of the universe. What is valued, what is given status as Real, what is appropriate to love. The poet-prophet didn't emerge suddenly in Romanticism, popping out of Worsdworth's head like the Robot on FLCL; it was coddled, protected, tended like a rare flower, set to bloom at the right time, throbbing underneath us the whole time. The philosopher-kings who will save us in Plato's The Republic were the forerunners to the poets who staved off dystopia during the Revolutionary upheavals of the 18th and 19th centuries. The rhetoric of dystopia is tied to the origins of rhetoric itself: as a political, civil tool, rhetoric shaped "Western" states and communities. Rhetoric is steeped in the goal of attaining the ideal, of receiving justice, ordering relationships among citizens. U/Dystopian rhetoric feels so didactic because its concerns are the same as those were when rhetoric was at its origins. It is what we know, and what we know well, what we Compositionists teach our students to see in the advertisements of magazines and TV shows.
I see it forming even in the dialogue Gorgias, the commonplaces that get transformed into plotlines in 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World. And I have to wonder: Are there African dystopias? Chinese? Middle Eastern? Of course, the apocalyptic narrative is as old as Judaism, but what of the focus that makes it uniquely dystopian: the desire that the text itself will change the future? That writing dystopian cities prevents their existance? Or is dystopia only possible because of its ties to rhetoric and logic, the need for binary oppositions and the privileging of the mind over the body?
In postmodernism, we revel at our "progress" past these definitions. A fictional place may be both utopian and dystopian, or neither/nor. Topian. But our ability to think out of these (Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, cyberpunk in general) is not so much a triumph of Derridian deconstruction and an evolving sophistication of thought as it is a haphazzared break from an ontological prison created by Plato and Friends a few thousand years ago. Thanks, Plato. Had we stuck with the Sophists, it is likely dystopian fiction as we know it would have never been written. Certainly the rhetorical strategies used to convince readers to embark upon social change would have been quite different. It is likely that literary style as a whole would be quite different. Imagine 1984 written not with the tone of desperation and suspense leading up to a climax, but the continual ebb and flow of tension, the stylistics of the Sophists making hell not just from description but from the rhythm and sounds of the words themselves. Imagine if "context" had been privileged throughout history, and relativism had come into our consciousness not via Albert Einstein's mathematical proofs, but as a cultural assumption just as firm as our belief in science.
And what do we do with that shaky category of text called "narrative"? Is narrative, as the early rhetoricians believed, a part of (tool of?) a larger rhetoric? Is narrative a style of speaking, of ordering information? Does it belong in the middle of an argument, as a method of support? As a rhetorical technique, is narrative outside the realm of the analysable?
Or, is narrative, rhetorical itself; always/already constructed with a careful beginning, middle, end, styled to an audience's taste, and contingent upon context? Perhaps my trouble with distinction is a historical one: When did narrative stop being a part of a larger rhetorical construct, and begin to be able to act on its own, without the appeals to the gods, the statement of purpose, the address to the audience, that Aristotle and others pre/describe? How did narrative get to stand alone--how, over time, did audiences become so accustomed to the commonplaces of rhetoric that we could skip all that beginning framing stuff and jump right to the story? And how do children today learn those assumptions? Are we yet trapped within our topoi? Is that why there hasn't been any new genres of literature in a few hundred years, only hybrids of existing ones?
How the hell do you get an entire world to change its generic expectations so that new types of argument and new methods of rhetoric can come into being?
What is rhetoric? What is communication? We could dwell on categorizations and qualifications of our terms. We could theorize the limits of human understanding, of identification, of brain chemistry and language. But these questions are themselves constructed questions, being important only in so far was we're told they're important, they've always been important. Etc. But I agree with Levinas, that there must be questions prior to ontological ones--not What is X?
Not What is the nature of Y? We've been trying to answer these questions ever since the Greeks woke up one morning and started a republic dependent on speaking. We all know what we're doing, we all have an implicit, intuitive sense of what rhetoric and oratory are--even Plato admits this in Gorgias. But to actually define it, in sentence form, with all qualifications and complications is a stupid, exhausting, and fruitless enterprise. We're asking the wrong questions for this context.
That's what I learned at Bluffton, I think. That the questions most academics ask will take us only so far: the limit of ontology is, for the moment, the sphere of the academy. If we want to move beyond the academy, we have to stop asking "to be" questions, and ask "For whom?" The "surprsing" move toward ethics (the "ethical turn" that comes after the "cultural turn" and the "rhetorical turn") isn't surprising at all. The dystopian threads that permeate everyting (according to me, according to Jameson, according to Booker), require that we take notice of where we are. Of what we're doing. And of how these texts keep pushing at us, being determinative. Even before our "post-9/11 world" dystopia was startlingly present, and dystopia has always concerned the relationship of the individual to the many, of self to state. Foucault showed us that we're living in dystopia and that we happily consent to it.
So pay attention: dystopia is utopia and utopia is dystopia. The difference is in the stories we tell about them. As I told Pam Nath three years ago, "It's all just words."

Thoughts while on 3A

Guardian
He never cared about the hole by her temple. An open space to worship near the sacred concrete. Here they could both stare at something else for awhile.
She always paused before entering into this contract. Head slightly cocked to the left, suspending words like marionets. She was the type of person to theorize each brick in the wall.
He turned his head away when she fell every morning. The ritual failure caught just enough to be unseen. She cried and rubbed the hole by the temple for hope tomorrow.
He piled the softness around her ankles more each afternoon. His halo made dimmer for her bright eyes. The pair scuffled, waded in cloth and silk and light.
She saw him as two people become one in her dreams. Lips poised at the ready to spur on great works of man. She closed her door so he wouldn't hear her pray.