Rabkin, The Fantastic, Chapters 4-6

Rabkin's definition of Sci fi: "One definition that seems to encompass the diverse works we havem entioned is this: a work belongs in the genre of science fiction if its narrative world is at least somewhat different fromo ur own, and if that difference is apparent against the background of an organized body of knowledge" (119). This definition includes dystopian fiction of all types, then, not just technologic ones--"body of knowledge" here might include social knowledge, religious knowledge, or ecological knowledge (although that, too, borders on the scientific). Rabkin further notes that this definition is dependent upon a sense of "difference" and the audience's perspective. Rabkin even goes so far as to posit a prescription: "A good work of science fiction makes one and only one assumption about its narrative world that violates our knowledge about our own world and then extrapolates the whole narrative world from that difference" (121). For me, the key word here is "extrapolates"--this is what good dystopian fiction does: it extrapolates one element, and leaves the rest untouched, so as to allow for reader identification and recognition.

I have some trouble with Rabkin's "reversal"; at times there is a complete reversal, but many works that are fantastic (i.e. Doctor Who) are serial in nature, and it is hard to imagine continual reversals--after all, once we accept that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside, it becomes a normal part of the narrative, a joke that the reader is "in on" and can appreciate the non-shock value when new characters seem surprised. This is not fantastic for anyone but the confused human who keeps running around the edges of the blue box; nor is there anything fantastic about the Stargate, after the first movie. What is reversed in Stargate the series? What is reversed in ;the 200+ episodes of Doctor Who? If I answer nothing, then I'd be saying they aren't fantastic. Unless...this is why there always must be a moment of exposition to new or minor characters, so that we can once more bereminded that htis is a reversal. Where, then, does the identification lie?

Rabkin later (144) distinguishes Utopias (or, "approval") and Dystopias ("disapproval") and divides each into subgenres based on their reliance on either "contemporary perspectives" or "Organized body of knowledge" (one leading, of course, to "fantasy" and one leading to "science fiction"). He further divides each of these into either "extrapolation" or "reversal"--and then gives examples of each. I heartily disagree with his placement of "We" under the "reversal-knowledge" box of dystopian fiction, for I feel there is far more extrapolation at work than reversal, and that that extrapolation is a critique of "contemporary perspectives." It is not so much that OneState is a world where imagination is bad (a reversal) than this ban on imagination is an extrapolation of Stalinist Russia (which is when/where this book was written). If Bellamy's Looking Backward is an extrapolation of Victorian social policies into an ambiguous (at best) utopia where the sick are criminals and criminals are sick, how is We's "illness of imagination" any different?

Rabkin's further chart of circles(147) upon overlapping circles (which place dystopias INSIDE utopias....which i heartily disagree with) only serves to point out that classifying genres by category is a difficult and, in the end, not very helpful cause. Of course, his chart helps me to see why I call some things "true" dystopias--and while there isn't a space for post-apocalyptic fiction, I can imagine another circle for that. It also helps to show the releationship between Sartreian (word?) satire and dystopian fiction--both are "disapprovals" (I'm digging this word)--or in Burke, "stylized, strategic responses"--but are different narratively and aesthetically. More importantly, they are different rhetorically, featuring a different audience, a different purpose (exigence), and very different constraints (publishing-wise).

"In addition to showing new relatinships among works that use the fantastic to similar degrees, inspection of each display alone may well be profitable. For example, works in areas 4 and 7 seem to assume that man will change under the operation of science, while works in areas 6 and 9 seem to assume that society will change under the operation of man. This contrast suggests two hypotheses: 1) science fiction writers feel man is ultimately subject to powers beyond his control, while 2) satirists feelt hat men are always responsible for their actions." (149). Hence the inherent struggle in dystopian fiction for agency over structural determinism. Of course, this is always a question when we begin to speak of change, as Burke notes in P&C. Is it the Scene that makes the Agent, or the Agent who makes the Scene? Dystopian writers tend to feel that man has a choice up to a point--and that point was passed long before the start of their stories.
Of course, Rabkin is the one who set up this chart, and so it is not a "natural" chart like the table of the elements--it shows us Rabkin's assumptions instead of some natural property of the genre. And he begins with the assumption that these three genres (science fiction, utopian fiction, and satire) *are* three seperate genres, and he separates them according to his own understanding of the fantastic. He is asking the "essence" question--is text A essentially science fiction? And if so, what is the essence of scifi? Instead, we should take a more rhetorical approach: in what cases under what conditions does text A count as a member of genre X?

Satire, it seems to me, is a rhetorical mode, not a genre--a way of stylizing an argument, a way of arguing, like "deliberative" or "forensic" and carries with it certain topoi (just as "deliberative" always--according to Aristotle--has some discussion of "the good", satire always carries with it some discussion of benefits and the good of society, but reverses the logical means of arguing.)
After reminding us that the Victorian attitude toward technology informs most texts, and all scifi texts, Rabkin fastforwards to the 20th Century's complex attitude toward science in general, and technology specificially. "In the twentieth century all utopian schemes have included technology, and it is only sicne the emergence of the psychic monolith of The Bomb taht utopias are required to include, as wells did wtih this ruleing elite of humanists, a safeguard against technology gone astray" (155). I'm not sure we can locate The Bomb as the shift from a utopian-in-general attitude to the "dystopian impulse" Booker finds, but it is a good marker, and we can say that by the time of The Bomb, the shift had definitely happened.

"If the fantastic is indeed a basic mode of human knowing, then we should be able to see related and parallel developments in non-narrative materials (190). A way of knowing that is non-scientific draws us into Lyotard's questions of post-modern epistemology. And I must again ask: What do we do with post modern dystopias like "The Dispossessed", which does not clearly reverse anything, but reverses reversals and leaves us disorented. And what to do with the non-programatic medium of American film? What do we do about The Matrix (the place)? The film does not give us an answer but to Wait for The One. Agency is deprived, and we become voyeurs into a horrific landscape, but nothing more. The reversals in The Matrix displace us without allowing us to emerge from the theatre and re-orient. It reverses not the narrative of the film, but the grounds of our own reality, and lets us flounder around this construct as the minor characters we are--but now we are horrifically aware of our own status. This is in opposition to the satirical mode of arguing, to the traditional utopian mode of argument, in that it not only assumes that the Scene determines the act, but that the Scene has been determined by some outside force far greater than ourselves. There *is* no argument beyond a simple revelation (Welcome to the desert of the Real), no equipment for living. It's Stylized, but not strategic.

Rabkin, The fantastic in literature

Rabkin, Eric. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1976
Chapter 1
"Talking plants--and (Komodo) dragons for that matter-- are not inherently fantastic; they become so when seen from a certain perspective. The fantastic does more than extend experience; the fantastic contradicts perspectives" (4)

Star Trek time travel episodes to the 20th C does the opposite--the fantasy there is that we ever thought in such primitive ways as we now do. For a member of the Enterprise to enjoy 20th C scifi, then, they must "suspend their disbelief" in order to "be rewarded by a delightful fantasy. Those who aren't willing to follow the signs in the text will throw down the book in distaste. Unless one participates sympathetically in the ground rules of the narrative world, no occurrence in that world can make sense--or even non-sense." (4)

Rabkin distinguishes three non-normal occurrences in literature: The Un-expected, the dis-expected and the anti-expected. (8-10). The Unexpected is literally not expected, but is not in breaking with the rules of the novel or the reader's own world. The dis-expected are "those elements which the text had diverted one from thinking about but which, it later turns out, are in perfect keeping with the ground rules of the narrative. Jokes depend on the dis-expected" (9). And the anti-expected is most closely aligned with fantasy, and are the 180 degree reversal of the ground rules (i.e. in Gulliver's Travels, we are given a scientific, adventurer's opening monologue--enmeshing us in the Enlightenment world view--but then there are tiny little people!) But "because so many of our perspectives enter a narrative with us...fiction often conflates the anti-expected and the dis-expected" (12).

"We have then three classes of signal for the fantastic: signals of the characters....signals of the narrator...and signals of the implied author (such as the narrative structures of Borges and Moorcock" (24).

For Rabkin, Fantasy is a genre, but "the fantastic" is a literary function of the reversal of the ground rules for a given diegesis. Can I do the same with "Dystopian fiction" and the dystopian impulse Booker describes? If so, what is that function? It's a rhetorical function, not aesthetic or plot-dependent, that's for sure.
z
What is fantastic about dystopian fiction? The fantastic happens when the hero/ine has that moment of recognition, of "enlightenment" (apt word, amylea!), and becomes able to see that his/her own world is *wrong*--and begins to desire to change what seems to be a utopia. Dystopian fiction depends no shifting perspectives, past and future, cause and effect--a recognition of the present as evil, of--to quote myself--the bait *as* bait, and not a yummy and convenient worm.

Chapter 2

The Fantastic and Escape

[Burke speaks of "escapist" literature in P&C--but he wants to note how we label literature, what motives that reveals, what interpretations are embedded in that naming]

Rabkin reminds us that "escapist" literature usually refers to lit that society perceives as having little value, as aiding the reader in a "general evasion of responsibilities" (43). What is interesting about this naming, for me at least, is that it marks genre not as a matter of form, but of effect.

Rabkin, of course, believes this label has two misconceptions: "First, that 'seriousness' is better than 'escape'; second, that escape is an indiscriminate rejection of order" (44). I would add that "order" is necessarily the goal--for many dystopian fictions wish to avoid order at all costs (especially those of the totalitarian persuasion). In that case, escape and the evasion of responsibility (but not response-ability) that goes with it are the intended effect upon the reader--a symbolic act of evading order (by reading to escape) that hopefully bleeds over into similar disruptive acts (what Badiou calls an intervention?) in Real Life.

"Escape in literature is a fantastic reversal, and therefore not a surrender to chaos" (45). The "escape" is an escape from the schemas of our mind, our "ground rules" of the universe. Further, "in the literature of the fantastic, escape is the mans of exploration of an unknown land, a land which is the underside of the mind of man" (45). Therefore, even the worst case scenario can have order--it's simply our world in negatives. More importantly, as Rabkin implies, is that the reader can recognize these aspects, can become educated, can be comforted by knowing that his own world is equally structured (or rather, inversely structured)--a sense of Justice emerges.

Rabkin then traipses off into structuralist land by reviewing Propp's thesis that all fairy tales have the same deep structure--this I do not disagree with, although as a Burkeian I'd point out that they seem to have the same structure because of how we name the similarities, and I'm more interested in why we wish to be able to name these disparate examples as "the same." And why "the same" is a good thing, a comfort. Still, I can't help but see a similar structure in both "fairy tales" and "dystopian fiction" (both of which Rabkin would categorize under "the fantastic in literature"); in both, there is a moment of recognition that leads the hero to a journey, traveling across an unfamiliar landscape where some all knowing villain is waiting and watching. But unlike in fairy tales, the dystopian protagonist is not rescued, does not learn his/her lesson. It is as though Hansel and Gretel get eaten after all, as though no prince awakens Sleeping Beauty and she is suspended in the void of sleep forever.

Fairy tales represent "a controlled world" (56), and this world is "an escape from our own, but, as with Poe, an escape through a diametric, fantastic reversal, so that the narrative world actually explores the underside of our conscious world. This world of escape is a controlled world, controlled not by the archfiend within us, but by the conventions of the fantastic genre itself" (57). Here I'd pull out the Lex Rhet from Burke--the form itself is a fulfillment of desire, the form itself acts as a response to the chaos represented within that form. As such, the genre works best when we are familiar with it, when we know what to expect, what to desire, how to respond fittingly.

The rigid form of fairy tales works not because of some cosmic alignment (the golden ratio) but because it is easily recognizable. It's very existence is proof of order, and thus a comfort. As Rabkin writes, "By making a fantastic reversal of the rules of our world and offering an ordered world, fears of maturation can be met and symbolically tamed" (59). Likewise, by making a fantastic reversal of social order, ecologic order, technologic order, we should expect a symbolic taming of fears of The End. This, indeed is what Utopian fiction does. But dystopian fiction does not tame the fears, does not symbolically temper the chaos, but encourages it.

Dystopian fiction does not end happily ever after because a return to the present order is not the goal. Escape is not the goal, but a heightened presence, an awareness of the here and now and of responsibility. The moral of the story is not borne of the mores of a community (as with fairytales) but emerges from fears of those very hierarchies and assumptions. Dystopian fiction doesn't reverse the ground rules, it amplifies them so that we can see them more clearly. It make the fish aware of water, it makes the trout differentiate bait from food.

"In some fashion, escape literature always presents the reader with a world secretly yearned for. If that world is merely the too-good-to-be-hoped-for accumulation of the dis-expected, as in pornography, it may reveal much about the writer and/or reader, but will not serve to give either a new perspective on the mental constraints from which they seek escape. However, if the escape world is based on a fantastic reversal, then, as with the fairy tale, that escape need not be a descent into triviality but a message of psychological consolation" (73).

But I'm not sure triviality is the correct word here. For much "work" is accomplished in slash and fanfic in general, which one can read as "too good to be hoped for accumulation of the dis-expected" (in that the scenarios of fic are within the realm of reality, but highly unlikely and sometimes against the ground rules set up--"canon")--work for both the author and the reader. But perhaps Rabkin is correct that this work is not quite enough--could that be the driving desire behind fandom? That no amount of writing, reading, picture rendering, discussing, role playing, can ease the desire to make the dis-expected the norm? That we cannot overthrow the ground rules of our society by simply playing with a text, now matter how many pages or hours we spend? Rabkin wants fantasy texts to be "psychologically useful" (73)--but useful for what? In what context? For whom? What "order" must this reinforce? Slash is the reversal, the "queering" of order anyway--so I doubt it'd be psychologically useful in the way Rabkin imagines.

Prelim notes: Buber I

Buber, Martin. "Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour." On the Bible. Ede. Nahum Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1982.

Buber begins with an anecdote-like paragraph about those times we all face wherein we recognize a *moment*--that this moment will change everything, the (as Badiou might say) horizon of an event. At this moment there are two basic impulses: first, to "cherish the until-now-unsuspected certainty of thus being able to particpate on the ground of becoming" (to seize the day and make change); or to "banish all such impulses and resolve... not to let himself be fooled--not by the situation, which is just an embroilment, and not by himself, who is just a man come to grief; for everything is linked invincibly with everything else, and there is nowhere a break where he can take hold" (172). Again, I turn to Badiou--how does something new emerge? How do we break with the state of the situation, with the continual movement of "history" in order to form a future? Is human agency (here, "choice"--173) part of that break, or are humans just incidental? What is history?

"How shall we manage to escape from the dilemma whose discursive expression is the old philosophiucal quarrel between indeterministic and deterministic views of the world?" (173). Indeed, this old quarrel seems to be what dystopian fiction addresses--the genre as a whole seeks to provide a response to that quarrel (to "put in his oar" in Burke's words), and the early pieces, at least, fall on the side of choice, making that implication by their very publication, their readership, their circulation. Later, "postmodern" dystopian fictions are less certain of their own agency, their ability to incite choice by increasing awareness. Buber states this for me: "....philosophy does justice to the life experience in which the moment of benginning the action is illumined by the awareness of freedom, and the moment of having acted is overshadowed by the knowledge of necessity" (173).

Buber next asks several questions "Does a historica; hour ever experience its real limits otherwise than through undertaking to overstep those limits it is familiar with? Does the future establish itself ever anew or is it inescapably destined?" (173)--again, these are the questions that dystopian fiction addresses, and answers with many different answers. Then again, it's "equipment for living", not holy scripture, so that's not surprising. These two options--breaking with history (choice) or following a predetermined progression in faith are visible in the two kinds of apocalyptic writings in the Bible--those of "the prophets in the ages of the kings of Judah and Israel" and those of "the apocalyptic writings of Jewish and Jewish-Christian coinage in the age of late Helenism and its decline" (174). Human understanding of history and our role in it has changed dramatically, giving rise to these two options, this crisis of agency--the divide between the "prophetic" and the "apocalyptic" (174).

Jeremiah is his key OT example--Buber explains that twenty years before the destruction of Jerusalem, before the exile, God spoke to him to reveal the change that was to come. Jeremiah becomes the prophet, the "announcer" (Nabi/navi)(175). In Jeremiah, God is seen as a potter who "works on the historical shapes and desitines of human nations" (176) but humans still have freedom to either act in accordance with his will or to turn from the plan. Jeremiah, as the announcer, reads the situation before him, and plans his speeches accordingly--sometimes he tells them to turn from evil for they will be saved, at other times he proclaims a coming storm, an inevitable catastrophe (176). In either case, "no end is set to the real working power of the dialogue between divinity and mankind, within whichcomapssion can answer man's turning of his whole being back to God" (176). The time table is open, there is no sense of entellechy. "Dialogue" is key here--the conversation is ongoing, not one prophecy (fiction) mapped out already. Put simply, "The task of the genuine prophet was not to predict but to confront man with the alternatives of decision" (177).

Buber cites one important "mixed form" (hybrid genre) between the prophetic and the apocalyptic--that of the "anonymous prophet of the Babylonian exile" who appears in Isaiah. "Among the prophets he was the man who had to announce world history and herald it as divinely predestined. In place of the dialogue between god andf people he brings the comfort of the One preparing redemption to those He wants to redeem; God speaks here not only having foreknown but also having foretold what now takes place in history--the revolutionary changes in the life of hte nations and the liberation fo Israel conummated in it" (178). In this new genre, there is "the unheard-of new character of the historical situation" (179).

We begin with the Fourth Book of Ezra, in which "the speaker pretends to be living as amember of the king's house in exile just after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans", yet the book was clearly written in the first century CE: "The actual historical-biographical situation of the speaker is deliberately replaced by an alien scene taken over as analogous to his own" (180). Here we get further contrasts between the fiction-writer (the writer of apocalypses) and the prophet--the prophet "addresses persons who should hear him" while the "apocalyptic writer has no audience turned toward him; he speaks into his notebook. he does not really speak, he only writes; he does not write down the speech, he just writes his thoughts--he writes a book" (180). In the apocalyptic writings, "there exists for him [the writer] no possibility of a change in the direction of historical destiny that could proceed from man, or be effected or coeffected by man. The prophetic principle of the turning is not simply denied in its individual form, but aturning on the part of the communithy is no longer even thought of" (182). Here I should connect communual turning, communal atoning to Girard's sacrificial atonement and the role of tragedy. Somehow.

Connections: "There is, of course, an optimistic modern apocalyptic, the chief example of which is Marx's view of the future. This has erroneously been ascribed a prophetic origin....Here in place of the power superior to the world that effects the transition, an immanent dialectic has appeared" (183). Yes, yes it has.

---

Further contrasts: "Prophecy originates in the hour of the highest strength and fruitfullness of the Eastern spirit, the apocalyptic out of the decadence of its cultures and religions" (183).

Course Encyclopaedia--Even MORE

Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2007.

• The Multiple


• The One


• Situation


• Count-as-one


• Presentation


• The Void


• The Event

The Multiple

"In sum, the multiple is the regime of presentation; the one, in respect to presentation, is an operational result; being is what presents (itself)" (24). The multiple, as a presented element, is also counted. Thus, a mulitple is what gets counted in the count.

"There is another way of putting this: the multiple is the inertia which can be retroactively discerned starting from teh fact that the operation of the count-as-one must effectively operate in order for there to be Oneness" (25). To me, this makes the most sense mathematically. If we consider set theory as mathematicians do, sets are sets of numbers that are grouped according to a common rule (or two or three). These numbers in the set (what B calls "multiples") must fit into the rule to make the set "true"--to fit the definition. If we say "the set of all odd integers", we are giving not only a structure to the set, but anticipating what will be in the set. If we were mathematicians, we'd say that the set of all odd integers is represented by 2n +1--and the formula given allows for an infinity of multiples, and allows us to anticipate what is to come. The count is an effect of this formula, since the formula itself is what first determines what belongs to the "set of all odd integers". Of course, this formula itself can be counted, and the set of all odd integers has other subsets within it (including the elusive "set of all prime numbers"). In math, structure and the count are both easily represented formulaically, and we can predict easily what belongs once that formula can be found (except for the prime numbers one. Damn). Humans are not so easy to order with shorthand.

The One

"The one is not" (23). In "deciding" upon the problem of Western metaphysics ("what presents itself is essentially multiple; what presents itself is essentially one"), Badiou declares that the One--that is, the essence of Being, the unpresented Platonic Ideal, is not. Or, in English, that the unpresented Whole, is not available to us without first there being the parts (multiples) which are presented, which present "being" by there mere presence in our field of vision. Or hearing. Or some other method of witnessing.


"The fact that the one is an operation allows us to say that the domain of the operation is not one" (24). The one is a function of the count in that in counting what is present, we are presented with presentation--which is being itself.

Situation

"I term situation any presented multiplicity.....Every situation admits its own particular operator of the count-as-one. This is the mpost general definition of a structure it is what prescribes, for a presented multiple, teh regime of its count-as-one" (24).

"Yet there is no situation without the effect of the count, and therefore it is correct to state that presentation, as such, in regard to number, is multiple" (25).

Count-as-one (compter-pour-l'un)

See Situation, above. The presented multiples must be counted. The count-as-one also forms the structure of the situation, is a definitional operation. It includes or excludes.
Presentation/Unpresentable/Re-presentation

"Structure is what obliges us to consider....that presentation is a multiple...and what authorizes us, via anticipation to compse the terms of the presentation as units of a multiple" (25). The structure, the formula, is what enables us to see that the set of all integers (the One, being) is Not--that there is only the multiples that occur after the count, after the presentation of examples (multiples, elements) that belong to a given set.

"...for presence is the exact contrary of presentation" (27). Presence is the Being that Plato imagines--being qua being. Presentation, however, is one step removed; it's the expression (interesting word, considering B avoids talking about the symbolic) of that ultimate Being. Presence's definition contains within it the idea that it cannot be presented--the English term uses the past participle for a reason, to show some kind of transformation has taken place, some displacement occurs from the original (Present) to the new form (presentED). Further:

"If there connot be a presentation ofbeing because being occurs in every presentation--and this is why it does not present itself--then there is one solution left for us: that the ontological situation be the presentation of presentation" (27). The situation (the count of, the structure of) being must have presentation within it, but what is it presenting, if not being itself (since being can't be presented?) It is presenting the very idea of presentation--which, again, contains within it the idea of some original Presence somewhere. Or when.


The Void
"...every situation implies the nothing of its all. But the nothing is neither a place nor a term of the situation. For if nothing were a term that could only mean one thing; that it had been counted as one" (54). Every situation contains within it this void because "there is a being of nothing, as a form of the unpresentable" (in order to include, there must also be an exclusion. Every presentable, counted element of a situation also has an unpresented, unpresentable part that is the Being, the one, that is the operational result of the count-as-one) (54).

"The 'nothing' is what names the unperceivable gap, cancelled then renewed between presentation as structure and presentation as structured-presentation, between the one as result and the one as operation" (54). See my above comment.

"By itself, the nothing is no more than the name of unpresentation in presentation" (55). As we discussed in class, the void has only one element--it's name, which names all of the unpresentables as unpresentable.

"I term void of a situation this suture to being. Moreover, I state that every structural presentation unpresents 'its' void, in the mode of this non-one which is merely the subtractive face of the count" (55). The void is a result of a subtraction ( 0 only exists as x - x), the subtraction of the inconsistent multiple from the consistent--or is it the other way around?


"It is essential to remember that no term within a situation designtes the void" (56). It's not surprising, then, that the state is unable to name revolutions as such.

"The void is what bounds the inconceivable, and thereby forecloses itself from any other relation, including its self-identity" (Barker. Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press, 2002, P. 5).

Event

And names: "The event has the nameless as its name: it is with regard to everything that happens that one can only say what it is by referring to its unknown Soldier" (205). The event, at the edge of the void, cannot be recognized by the state, for fear of the unpresented mass of the void. The name of the event is important, then, for what it can tell us about the multiples involved.

And the state: "The event occurs for the state as the being of an enigma" (208). The state, again, cannot recognize the event for what it is because the situation does not count the unpresented.


The evental site is "an entirely abnormal multiple, that is, a mulitple such that none of its elements are presented in the situation" (175). None of the elements of the site are presented, are not part of the legitimated count--thus, this is the space of possibility.

Course Encyclopaedia--More!

Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 1991.

1. Field


2. Captial, types of


3. Habitus


4. Symbolic Power

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Field

Definition "The purpose of Bourdieu's concept of field is to provide the frame for a 'relational analysis,' by which he means an account of the multi-dimensional space of positions and the position taking of agents" (Postone, LiPuma, and Calhoun 5).

As structuralist? "Here Bourdieu reveals the structuralist underpinnings of his theory. He posits that the field is not ontologicaly grounded, but rather constituted of ever-changing relations--it is not a static thing, but a dynamic process, in which fluid relationality is the source of structure. He also refers to a universal aspect of all fields, cultural and otherwise: each involves specific forms of capital, which the agents aim to accumulate and increase through their varying 'strategies'" (Hipsky 192).

Field, then, is somewhat similar to the field (champs) that Foucault describes--it is not simply there, but a construct of relationships. For Bourdieu, these relationships are economical (in that they relate to forms of exchange for strategic purposes).


Political fields: These specific fields are "the site in which, through the competition between the agents involved in it, political products, issues, programmes, analyses, commentaries, concepts and events are created--products between which ordinary citizens, reduced to the status of 'consumers', have to choose, thereby running a risk of misunderstanding that is all the greater the further they are from the field of production. (Bourdieu 172)

Bourdieu widens the political field to not only politicians, but discourse about politics (as long as that discourse comes from an authorized subject).

Capital, types of

Definition of: "Bourdieu's notion of capital, which is neither Marxian nor formal economic, entails the capacity to exercise control over one's own future and that of others" (Postone, LiPuma, and Calhoun 4).

Capital seems related to agency and power (pouvoir); how it differs from either of these is unclear to me.

Symbolic capital: "...functions to mask the economic domination of the dominant class and socially legitimate hierarchy by essentializing and naturalizing social position" (Postone, LiPuma, and Calhoun 5).

Why is symbolic capital special? "Symbolic capital might thus be said to have a dialectical relationship with the other forms of capital; as a concept it underscores the fact that none of the positive properties that circulate on the literary field ever permanently or objectively inhere in any of the individuals, groups, works, or literary forms that are held to partake of those properties" (Hipsky 192).

Symbolic capital is a mystifying (a la Marx) force--it allows us to misrecognize the other forms of capital as natural or necessary.

Habitus


Definition: "Bourdieu characterizes the habitus as a system of general generative schemes that are both durable (inscribed in the social construction of the self) and transposable (from one field to another), function on an unconscious plane, and take place within a structured space of possibilities (defined by the intersection of material conditions and fields of operation (Postone, LiPuma, and Calhoun 4).

What it does: "Between the social structure and agents there is a high degree of correspondence, mediated and generated by the habitus. It is through the dispositions inculcated in the habitus as these unfold in the structural space of possibility that the relationship of individuals to a social structure is objectively coordinated....The possibility of historical change rests in the limited conjucture between a social structure and the actions of agents as mediated by the habitus" (LiPuma 16).

LiPuma posits the possibility of change as a side effect of habitus--habitus mediates between structural determinism and the free will of agents.

Symbolic Power

Symbolic power is created and maintained through structuring structures and structured structures.Symbols are imbued with associations, connotations, and thus power because of the symbolic system they arise from; these powers allow those in dominant positions to hold symbolic capital.

"Structuring Structures": Associated with the "neo-Kantian" tradition: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Durkheim, and in many ways Foucault, as "treats the different symbolic universes...as instruments for knowing and constructing the world of objects" (Bourdieu 164).

i.e. We use these structures to construct the mental and physical objects, to create world views.

"Structured Structures": Associated with the semiotics of Levi-Strauss and traditional structuralism. The always/already present structure is what creates meaning from symbols. (Bourdieu 166). Both Structuring and Structured structures only work by social consensus--insofar as subjects submit themselves to the symbolic power that emerges as a result of the system. Dominant classes use this symbolic power in the creation and maintenance of ideologies (a la Marx).

Course Encyclopaedia, continued

Foucault, Parts 3 and 4 (The Statement and the Archive and Archaeological Description).


Terms for this section

• Statement


• Genre


• Subject


• Author(ity)


• Constraints


• Ruptures and change


• Archaeology
  

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Statement

In French: l'énoncé, the said. Past participle of enoncer. Other uses: "Wording", "Utterance", "lecture", "declaration", "exposition"


What an énoncé is not: "We have put to one side, not in a definitive way, but for a time and out of methodological rigour, the traditional unities of hte book and the oeuvre; that we have ceased to accept as a principle of unity the laws of constructing discourse...or the situation of the speaking subject...; that we no longer related discourse to the primary ground of experience, nor the a priori authority of knowledge" (79).
And/nor: "I do not think that the necessary and sufficient condition of a statement is the presence of a defined propositional structure, or that one can speak of a statement only when there is a proposition" (80).
And: Statements can sort of be seen as a "sentence" bu "the equivalence is far from being a total one; and it is relatively easy to cite statements that do not correspond to the linguistic structure of sentences" (82).
It is also not "an act of formulation--something like the speech act referred to by the English analysts" (82-83).


Relationship to Burke: "...whether, while analyzing 'objects' or 'concepts,' let alone 'strategies', I was in fact still speaking of statements" (79-80).


An attempt at definition: "Must we admit that any series of signs, figures, marks, or traces--whatever their organization of probablity may be--is enough to constitute a statement .....? In which case, we would have to admit there is a statement whenever a number of signs are juxtaposed--or even, perhaps--when there is a single sign. The threshold of the statement is the threshold of the existence of signs" (84). This is still problematic, because MF is trying to talk about statements without talking about the situation or linguistic system (system of differences) or something external to the enunciative moment--and yet, "signs" are only signs in that they are agreed-upon substitutions for the signified. As he says, "If there were no statements, the language (langue) would not exist" (since language systems are rules based on acceptable statements). So clearly he must try again:


The statement is a unique formation, "neither entirely linguistic, nor exclusively material"; instead, it is "caught up...in a logical, grammatical, locutory nexus. It is not so much one element among others, a division that can be located at a certain level of analysis....it is a function of existence that properly belongs to signs and on the basis of which one may then decide, through analysis or intuition, whether or not they 'make sense', according to what rule they foolow one another or are juxtaposed, of what they are the sign, and what sort of act is carried out by their formulation" (86-87).


Relationship to the referent: "A statement is not confronted...by a correlate--or by the absence of a correlate as a proposition has (or has not) a referent....It is linked rather to a 'referential' that is made up not of 'things', 'facts', 'realities', or 'beings', but of laws of possibility, rules of existence for the objects that are named, designated, or described within it, and for the relations that are affirmed or denied in it" (91). In this description, there seems to be something logically prior to the statement that allows it to mean--things are named--this implies someone doing the naming in the past, some consensus on what counts or doesn't count as a "thing" that can be discussed, about which something can be said (énoncé).


And, at last, the clearest definition: "We will call statement that modality of existence proper to that group of signs: a modality that allows it to be something more than a series of traces, something more than a succession of marks on a substance, something more than a mere object made by a human being; a modality that allows it to be in relation wtih a domain of objects, to prescribe a definite position to any possible subject to be situated among other verbal performances, and to be endowed with a repeatable materiality" (107). My emphasis here--the statement positions us--it Situates us. Hence, "situation", the way things are positioned in relation to one another. These positions are hard to imagine, to theorize (to See) without imagining a corresponding space/time, and it is tempting to map these situations onto a geographical map or a timeline. To Place. But while some situations are dependent on physical space or "real time", some are not. My relationship to my father is a situation, a "placement" of subject positions created by our statements to and about each other, but these cannot be mapped onto a map of Ohio or Indiana. Likewise, statements made online cannot be mapped onto the space of the internet, despite our attempts to call them websites or William Gibson's dream of a navagatable matrix that corresponded exactly to ISP locations of servers. As a non-spatial person, I am most bothered by the attempts to describe all of these philosophical and theoretical concepts in terms of space, or diagrams or flow charts: I'm afraid this adds extra elements or makes relationships far more descrete and finite than they really are.

Enough ranting.

Genre [See also Genre in contemporary rhetorical theory]

MF seems to avoid the subject of "genre" as we think of it, probably because naming and thinking of things in terms of genres is itself a unique aspect of our discursive field. Still, there are times when his discussion of "discursive field" seems to border on what we call "genre"--something that is regular, with rules, but formed from the mass of statements. An appropriate response, if you will.

Use of Genre: When discussing the difference between statements and propositional structures, MF finds that two similar sentences, while propositionally the same, are quite different statements: "If one finds the formulation 'No one heard' in the first line of a novel, we know, until a new order merges, that it is an observation made either by the author, or the character (aloud or in the form of an interior monologue); if one finds the second forumulation, 'It is true that no one heard', one can only be in a group of statements constituting an interior monologue, a silent discussion with oneself, or a fragment of dialogue, a group of questions and answers" (81). Here, the placement of the statement in a novel matters: the statement would belong to quite a different discursive formation if it were found, say, in a newspaper, or between friends. Genres, for MF, seem to be here to help us analysts limit the possibilites when we encounter a new statement. We use the idea of "genre" to limit the possible discursive field the statement could belong to, but this does not mean that genre and discursive field are the same thing, for the discursive field of, say, nursing, has many genres involved. Some discursive fields are named for the genres that seem to dominate them (although, I assume, that any genre can participate in the formation of the discourse surrounding an object, subject, or idea). Genres, for Foucault, seem to be more for the analyst--something after the fact that we construct to help us better talk about the rules of formation with some regularity (instead of spinning off into a million clauses as Foucault finds himself doing). In Burkeian terms, we have the recurring situation of needing to discuss the rules that govern statements belonging to a particular discursive formation, and so we create a proverb, a strategy, a Name that can stand as short hand for all of those rules, contexts, authorities, etc that are part of the statement. Archaeology, then, is undoing this naming process, translating this shorthand back into its original grammar and signs.

A discursive formation is not a genre: A discursive formation does "not form a rhetorical or formal unity", but it is "made up of a limited number of statemetns for which a group of conditions of existence can be defined. Discourse in this sense is not an ideal, timeless form that also possesses a history; the problem is not therefore to ask oneself how and why it was able to emerge and become embodied at this point in time...." (117). Genre study, however, does try to trace the evolution of the genre--which, as Carolyn Miller notes, carries with it the assumption that the genre is now "fixed" ("ideal, timeless form"), that it is a Thing, not a process. Unlike genre, discursive formation does not address a rhetorical or formal unity--while Miller attempts to downplay the requirement of "formal" by moving genre into the realm of social action and speech act theory, there is still a rhetoricality to those things we call genre--a repeatablility, something that can be templated and parodied.

Relationship to Archaeology:

"Archaeology does not describe disciplines. At most, such disciplines may, in their manifest deployment, serve as starting-points for the description of positivities; but they do not fix its limits: they do not impose definitive divisions upon it; at the end of the analysis they do not re-emerge in the same state in which they enteredc it; one cannot establish a bi-univocal relation between established disciplines and discursive formations" (178-9). If by "discipline" he means "statements recognized belonging to the discipline, what I describe above as the dominant forms that help us identify a discourse formation, then clearly he is saying that genre--disciplined texts, texts of a discipline--analysis is different from what he calls archaeology.


Subject [See also Subjectivity from Parts II and III]

Relationship to statement: "A statement also differs from any series of linguistic elements by virtue of the fact that it possesses a particular relation with a subject" (92).

"We must not, in fact, reduce the subject of the statemetn to the first-person grammatical elements that are present within the sentence" (92). And thus, the author dies.

"Is not this subject exterior to the sentence quite simply the individual who spoke or wrote those words? As we know, there can be no signs without someone, or atelast something, to emit them. For a series of signs to exist, there must--in accordance with the system of causality--be an 'author' or a transmitting authority. But this author is not identical with the subject of the statement; and the relation of production that he has with the formulation is not superposable to the relation that unites the enunciateing subject and what he states" (92).

Foucault on Free Indirect Discourse (a literary theory term, style indirect libre): In a novel, we know there is an author whose "name" (George Eliot? Currier Bell?) appears somewhere on the cover. But there are many problems with simply attributing all sentences in the novel to the person who gets paid all the royalties: "(...we are still faced with teh problem of the dialogue, and the sentences purporting to express the thoughts of a character; we are still faced iwth the problem of texts published under a pseudonym: and we know all the difficulties that these duplications raise for practitioners of interperative anlaysis when they wish to relate these formations, en bloc, to the author of the text, what he [sic] wanted to say, to what he[sic] thought, in short, to that great, silent, hidden, uniform discourse on which they build that whole pyramid of different levels); but, even apart from those authorities of formulation that are not identical with the individual/author, the statemetns of the novel do not have the same subject which they provide when they describe things as they would be seen by an anonymous, invisible, neutral individual, who moves magically among the characters of the novel, or when they provide, as if by an immediate, internal decipherment, the verbal version of what is silently experienced by a character" (93). A long quote, yes, but important for those of us concerned with narrative voice in 18th and 19th C novels. The "Free Indirect Discourse" utilized best by Jane Austen is a rhetorical puzzle that many literary scholars try to PoMo their way out of by using the Death of the Author and Foucualt's comments on the author as function. But Foucault here is only pointing out what is bothering the critics in the first place: This other voice that interrupts the normal direct/indirect quote diad is not that of the author, and it is not enough to simply call it part of the author function and throw it away. I want to think through what this not-author, not-narrator voice does to the reader reading. How does it change the truth-value, the "realism" of the novel? How does it try to mold the inner reading voice of the reader to that of this non-author narrator?

The subject, the situation, and the statement: The ennunciative function is not "some additional relation that is superimposed on the others, one cannot say a sentence, one cannot transform it into a statement, unless a collateral space is brought into operation. A statement always has borders peopled by other statements. These borders are not what is usually meant by 'context'--real or verbal--that is, all the situational or linguistic elements taken together that motivate a formulation and determine its meaning" (97). The statement is something other than a sentence said in the right kind of "situation" (as Bitzer imagines there are rhetorical and non-rhetorical ones). What sets a statement apart is that it is unique, although connected to other statements--but these situations are not what "motivates" (as in exigency) a statement to arise. Nor is there any speaking subject bringing it into being, declaring it a statement and thus making it so--"it is not simply the manipulation by a speaking subject of a number of elements and linguistic rules" (99). Nope. Not Bitzer at all.

When analyzing statements we must "operate thereofre with out reference to a cogito." This analysis "does not pose the question of the speaking subject, who reveals or who conceals himself in what he says, who, in speaking, exercises his sovereign freedom, or who, without realizing it, subjects himself to constraints of which he is only dimly aware" (121). In a single sentence, Foucault does away with most of the assumptions that went into Bitzer's rhetorical situation, which required a speaking subject who evaluated the exigencies, tailored a speech to his audience (yes! His!), according to constraints such as genre, time, space, ethos, etc. To analyze the nature of, the thing behind (sub-stance?) a statement, then, we should not analyze it via Bitzer's hermeneutic.

Authority
"...the materiality of the statement is not defined the space occupied...but rather by its status as a thing or object.....we know, for example, that for literary historians the edition of a book published with the agreement of the author does not have the same status as posthumous editions, that the statements in it have a unique value..." (102). This unique value, however, comes not from the authority of the author, but the authority of the institutions of Literary History that bestow that unique value on special editions. The reason why, MF implies, we do value the version of Great Expectations that Dickens wrote first over the one his editor made him write, or the versions edited 100 years later by Dickens scholars (corrected texts, added illustrations, etc), is that the first edition, the edition with Dickens's hand on it, cannot be repeated once Dickens is dead. What is valued is the un-repeatablility.

Authorship: See Subjectivity above.
Constraints [See also Constraints in contemporary rhetorical theory]

Bitzer's constraints seem to imply a silencing--that if conditions were different, so much more would have been said. Bitzer's rhetorical situation can be seen as a filter: it sifts out from the mass of all utterances that which can be said for a given situation, and the mesh of the sieve is made up of situational constraints such as time, place, audience, etc. What emerges is what is left over once all of the unsaid things have fallen through.

Foucault's version of what is said (enonce) is just the opposite. Instead the Said being what is left after all else is silenced, a subtractive process, Foucault's system is one of Positivities. Foucault asserts that "the words, sentences, meanings affirmations, series of propositiosn do not back directly onto a primeval night of silence; but that the sudden appearance of a sentence, the flash of meaning...always emerge in the operational domain of an enunciative function; that between the language as one reads and hears it, and also as one speaks it....there is not a profusion of things half said, sentences left unfinished, thoughts half expressed, an endlessm onolgue of which only a few fragments emerge" (112). Instead, statements are generated by the positivities of a given discursive field (125).

Rupture and change

[See also Badiou's Event above

Relationship to "regularity": "An analysis that reinvests in the empirical element of history...the problematic of the origin: in every oeuvre, in every book, in the smallest text, teh problem is to rediscover the point of rupture, to establish, with the greatest possible precision, the division between the implicit density of the already-said, a perhaps involuntary fidelity to aquired opinon, the law of discursive fatalities, and the vivacity of creation, the leap into irreducible difference" (142). This, Foucault says, is what the history of ideas attempts to do: to find the "tipping point" (as Malcolm Gladwell class it) of an era, idea, movement, discourse. This poses two possiblities: resemblance and procession--either the new idea resembles an old one or it is simply the natural evolution of a series of ideas.
On rarity: the analysis of statements and discourse formations seeks to "establish a law of rarity" (118), to determine what might have been said in a given situation compared to the statements that did appear.
Events and rarity: "...archaology distinguishes several possible levels of events within the very density of discourse....[including]a fourth level, at which the substitution of one discursive formation for another takes place. These events, whic hare by far the most rare, are, for archaeology, the most important" (171). The rarity of a truly new discursive formation is what interests the archaeologists. Here, the event is a linguistic one: the changing out of one form for another in an abrupt and radical way.
Archaeology

In true Foucauldian fashion, we are given more about what archaeology is not than what it is. The chapter "Archaeology and the History of Ideas" contrasts the two methods extensively--but it is simple enough to state that Archaeology seems to do exactly the opposite of the history of ideas, it seems throw out many of "history"'s main thinking tools (like "object" and "subject"), and has a very different understanding of the "progression" of history--Archaeology is concerned with the gaps, not the continuity.

Other, more positive definitions:

"Archaeological description is concerned with those discursive practices to which teh facts of sucession must be referred if one is not to establish them in an unsystematic and naive way, that is in terms of merit" (144).

"Archaeological analysis individualizes and describes discursive formations. That is, it must compare them, oppose them to one another in the simultaneity in which they are presented, disctinguish them from those that do not belong to the same time scale...[etc. A lot}" (157).
"Archaeology tries to establish the system of transformations that constitute 'change'; it tries to develop this empty, abstract notion, with a view to according it the analysable status of transformation" (173).

Comm Gloss: Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

Parts I and II

Terms

• History


• Space of Emergence


• Object(s)


• Subject(ivity)


• Discourse Formation

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"History"

Foucault:
"The old questions of the traditional [historical] analysis (What link should be made between disparate evens? How can a causal succession be established between them? What continuity or overall significance do they possess? Is it possible to define a totality, or must one be content with reconstituting connexions?) are now being replaced by questions of another type:[...]What types of series should be established? What criteria of periodization should be adopted for each of them?What systems of relations [...]may be established between them? [....] (3-4). History, or the work of historians, is no longer the study of causality and influence centered around a "spirit" of the period, but is now the analysis of disparate events breaking up that linear narrative. In other words, now historians are asking, with Burke, "How do you size up a situation?"--with "How" here referring to the power struggles, authorities, language choices, styles, traditions, and other forms that affect how we historicize.

"[...]thus, historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge" (5). Terministic screens go here.

Back in the day, "history" was simple: "The series being known, it was simply a question of defining the position of each element in relation to the other elements in the series" (7). This sounds like Bitzer's version of history and "situation": that there are objective facts we can write down in a predictable and ordered series, and these elements act as filters, sifting out what cannot be said from the totality of all utterances. Foucault sees this as a "negative" version of discourse formation; instead of seeing "constraints" and limits in the context, Foucault sees the elements as formative.

Total history: "seeks to reconstitute the overall form of a civilization, the principle--material or spiritual--of a society[...] what is called metaphorically teh 'face' of a period" (9). General history, its opposite, looks for "series of series" and a "total description" of the relations between historical elements (10).

Space and Space of Emergence

Foucault:

"So that the problem arises of knowing whether the unity of a discourse is based not so much on the permanence and uniqueness of an object as on the space in which various objects emerge and are continuously transformed" (32). "Space" is the important word here. What is "space"? How does that space itself get delineated?

"Object"

Foucault:
Major questions arise: "[...]how is one to specify the different concepts that enable us to conceive of discontinuity[....]? By what criteria is one to isolate the unities with which one is dealing; what is a science? What is an oeuvre? What is a theory? What is a text? (5). The "object" of study is not singular, does not have essence in and of itself, is not a unity, until it is embodied in discourse; nor does it exist prior to the discourse that constitutes it!


"Subject"

Foucault:
Traditional history created the conscious subject: "Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored to him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity; the promise that one day the subject--in the form of historical consciousness--will once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept at a distance by difference, and find in them what he may call his abode" (12). Several important things here: First, that the "subject" is a historical subject, that consciousness is a by product of a continuous history that accounts for cause and effect, events, purpose, and progress. Second, that the subject uses traditional senses of history (or needs it?) to order his/her consciousness and cope with (deal with, "size up") the present, to understand differentiation and division. Third, Foucault uses the word "abode"--a place, a home, a grounds from which the subject emerges. Without traditional, linear history, the subject cannot find the grounds from which s/he emerges (to use Burke's idea from the Grammar. In the "new" history, the subject is constituted by his/her position in a web of relations that don't exist prior to her/his participation in them--nor does the subject exist prior to the participation!

Excuse me while my head explodes.

"In this system [traditional history], time is conceived in terms of totalization and revolutions are never more than moments of consciousness" (12). Here is where Foucault intersects with dystopian rhetoric: In the traditional dystopias, the key to revolution is recognition--"consciousness" of history, of the historicity of the characters' present moment. In the new history, however, and in PoMo dystopias, this recognition is not enough, because "history" is no longer a linear path with easy causality, marching forward in an ordered Marxist way toward Utopia. Hence the subtitle of LeGuin's The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. What is ambiguous is what counts as utopia, how we know we've reached it, and for whom is the situation (however we delineate "a" situation) is utopian. What is ambiguous is the totalization of a group of people in a not-yet-differentiated time: Where do we draw the lines? Thus, the rhetorical force loses ground: there is no "forward" motion toward utopia because we are no longer sure what "forward" means. In Oryx and Crake utopia only appears without narrative, without humans. If discursive formations arise from specific grounds, we must consider what grounds dystopian fiction, always already historical and historicizing, emerges from, and why this discourse can appear in multiple genres across different "eras," and still be recognized as the "same."

Discourse Formation
Foucault:

How to find a "discursive unity": "But perhaps one might discover a discursive unity if one sought it not in the coherence of concepts, but in their simultaneous or successive emergence, in the distance that separates them and even in their incompatibility. One would no longer seek an architecture of concepts sufficiently general and abstract to embrace all others and to introduce them into the same deductive structure; one would try to analyse the interplay of their appearances and dispersion" (34).

He uses the idea of "theme" as a way of identifying a discursive unity among discourses. I think this is what I mean when I refer to a "dystopian rhetoric" or a "dystopian philosophy"--a set of assumptions, values, beliefs, worldviews, etc, which lead to (somehow) a unity of style, and selects the forms of novel and film almost necessarily.

MF finds the "theme" just as problematic a way of defining a unity as "essence"--themes change over time, influence each other--it is still a somewhat arbitrary naming of this *thing*, this body of discourses, that depends more on a gut feeling of interconnectedness than any criterion we can examine here.

COM 632S, or "Everthing you thought you knew about the rhetorical situation, but really you never did"

As you can tell from the long title, my COM class this semester is a bit more rigorous than the others I've taken. And that's a good thing, in some ways, because these are the things I NEED to be thinking about for the...you know. That which will not be named.

[Prelims]

As part of the class, Dr. Sam McCormick (any relation I wonder?), who kicks professorial ass, has asked us to do a "glossary" of terms, a handbook of authors and their relationships to each other, a list of cool quotes, etc. Now, I usually do something like that on here for the first few, crucial weeks of the semester for referencing later in the semester (when I've forgotten everything but my own name...and then some), but Sam is going to be grading these at regular intervals (i.e. TUESDAY of this week), which means I must actually continue my practice beyond week 4.

Damn.

On the plus side, if I put this "glossary" on this blog here, I can use that cute little search button at the top of the page when That Which Will Not Be Named rolls around, and I'm stuck on a rhetoric question.


So, without further ado [complaining], I present to you the first two weeks of Amy's Communication Studies Glossary of Terms Related to the Rhetorical Situation in Contemporary Theory. Enjoy.

• Strategy


• Situation


• Genre


• Structural determinism


• "Rhetorical"


• Exigence


• "Audience"


• Situational Con/re-straints

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Strategy

Burke:
Poetry is a strategic answer (PL 1)
“Another name for strategies might be attitudes” (PLF 297)
Burke defines for us “Strategy” by looking at the Concise Oxford and New English dictionaries, as well as quoting Andre Cheron.


Situation

Burke:
“Situations do overlap [across time], if only because men now have the asmae neural and muscular structure” (2) Physicality matters to situations.
“Proverbs ‘size up’ or attitudinally name” situations (2). Size up—as though we can symbolically encompass and control a situation. But, one must “size things up properly” (298).
Situations can recur, be “typical” (3) and “Social structures give rise to ‘type’ situations, subtle subdivision of the relationships involved in competitive and cooperative acts” (294). These give rise to genres, according to Jamieson and C. Miller.

Bitzer:
“There are circumstances of this or that kind of structure which are recognized as ethical, dangerous or embarrassing” (Rhet Sit, Phil and Rhet, 1968, p. 1) An attempt at defining “situation”
The rhetorical situation consists of audience, context, and exigence.
The presence of rhetorical discourse does not “give existence to the situation; on the contrary, it is the situation which calls the discourse into existence” (rhet sit, p. 2). Definitely “Scenic” like Burke’s Scene-Act ratio.
“It seems clear that rhetoric is situational” (rhet sit p. 3)
“Let us regard rhetorical situation as a natural context of persons, events, objects, relations and an exigence which strongly invites utterance; this invited utterance participates naturally in the situation, is in many instances necessary to the completion of situational activity, and by means of its participation with situation obtains its meaning and its rhetorical character” (Rhet sit, p. 5). First: “Natural”—while the word choice bothers me, his implication is clear: the rhetorical situation is not an imagined construct—it is part of the nature(damn that word) of communication. He also wants to emphasize here that the rhetorical situation and its invited utterances are not outside the real world, but that the utterance itself is part of the situation, and can give rise to other situations which require further utterances.
“Rhetorical situations exhibit structures which are simple or complex, and more or less organized” (11). Bitzer goes on to describe what he means by “simple” and “organized”, but the point is clear—by “organized” he means a “settled form with predictable outcomes”
“Finally, rhetorical situations come into existence, then either mature or decay or mature and persist—conceivably some persist indefinitely” (12). What does an “immature” situation look like? How can we tell?

Vatz, Richard.:
“NO situation can have a nature independent of the perception of its interpreter or independent of the rhetoric with which he chooses to characterize it” (226). Vatz goes on to say that Bitzer’s version of “situation” requires a “realist” philosophy of meaning, which has “unfortunate implications for rhetoric.” Vatz proposes another “perspective…from which to view the relationship between ‘situations’ and rhetoric.” Vatz links this to the “nature of meaning”—but I’m not sure what he means by that, except that meaning lies not in the object of study itself, but in the person looking at the object. I agree that Bitzer is entirely too Platonic in his understanding of the relationship between situation and meaning, in that case.
Situations are themselves rhetorical and communicative events, as “except for those situations which directly confront our own empirical reality, we learn of facts and events through sone’s communicating them to us. This involves a two part process. First, there is a choice of events to communicate” (228)
Second: “the translation of the chosen information into meaning. This is an act of creativity. It is an interpretive act. It is a rhetorical at of transcendence.” (228).

Genre

Burke:
“Each work of art is the addition of a word to an informal dictionary (or, in the case of purely derivative artists, the addition of a subsidiary meaning to a word already given by some originating artist)” (PLF 300). Burke’s parenthetical note seems to also apply to the idea of genres—often I think Burke ignores the idea of genres where he might find it helpful—here, “Scifi” is also a naming of a situation under which many individual texts fall, and they all share the same situation they are attempting to “size up” In as much as 1984 adds a “1984ism” to the informal dictionary, “dystopian fiction” as a naming does similar work—it de-term-ines both the text to follow and the situation itself.
In sociological criticism of art, “Art forms like ‘tragedy’ or ‘comedy’ or ‘satire’ would be treated as equipments for living, that size up situations in various ways an in keeping with correspondingly various attitudes” (304). Here, it’s not just a particular piece of literature that’s the equipment, but entire forms (genres). How is this different? Here, it is forms that size up situations, that give us attitudes (which makes sense, since genres are all about forming and setting attitudes and expectations in audience members).
Further, “Their [forms’] relation to typical situations would be stressed. Their comparative values would be considered, with the intention of formulating a ‘strategy of strategies,’ the ‘over-all’ strategy obtained by inspection of the lot” (PLF 304). Genres, then, are on another level of analysis, a more encompassing and more abstract (higher order?) of analysis. He even seems to be hinting at what Derrida calls the “Law of Genre” (Loi de genre)—that genre is law, division and separation and categorization, and that genre depends upon some higher order law of law, a logos of lex.

Bitzer:
“The difference between oratory and primitive utterance, however, in not a difference in function; the clear instances of rhetorical discourse and the fishermen’s utterances are similarly functional and similarly situational.” (Rhet sit, p. 5). See Burke on “contemporaneous” situations—PLF p. 301. Also note that Bitzer, like Burke, defines things functionally. The similarity between two utterances—one formal oratory, and one “primitive”—can lead to similar responses, repeated responses, and the creation of a genre.

Structural Determinism


Burke:
“He will not too eagerly ‘read into’ a scene an attitude that is irrelevant to it” (298). Burke seems to imply that situations contain within them a limited number of responses, but that there is still room to act: for earlier, he says, “One tries to change the rules of the game until they fit his own necessities” (298).

Bitzer:

“It is clear that situations are not always accompanied by discourse” (Rhet sit p. 2). But when the discourse is produced, it is necessarily “fitting.”
“The situation dictates the sorts of observations to be made; it dictates the significant physical and verbal responses; and, we must admit, it constrains the words which are uttered in the same sense that it constrains the physical acts of paddling the canoes and throwing the nets” (Rhet sit. p. 5). Note the word choice: Dictates. There is already a linguistic element embedded in the rhetorical situation, long before it ever invites a rhetorical response. If Burke says we respond in order to size a situation up, Bitzer seems to say that situations size themselves up for us.
“Although rhetorical situation invites response, it obviously does not invite just any response. Thus the second characteristic of rhetorical situation is that it invites a fitting response, a response that fits the situation” (10). But, as Vatz points out, if you read the situation from a different perspective, the situation may seem to prescribe many different “fitting” responses to different people. Only when the situation is “strong and clear” is the response obvious, and here “strong and clear” seems to mean “Traditional oratories in traditional genres.”

Miller, Arthur B.:
“Although an exigence essentially specifies limits, the rhetoric has creative latitude to interpret the significance of the exigence within those limits, and it is this latitude of the rhetor that is of primary interest here” (“Rhetorical Exigence” 111). This links back to Burke’s description of rhetorical utterances as “stylized” and “strategic” responses to a situation; Miller is, like me, emphasizing the “stylized” part—even if the situation’s exigency suggests and limits responses to those most fitting, the rhetor is capable of stylizing his/her utterance within certain limits so that not every response is exactly the same. In fact, part of the job of new members of a genre is to both a) fit into the genre, and b) differentiate themselves from other genre members by stylizing their texts in new ways that do not quite break the genre’s limits. Miller is less Scenic than Bitzer and Burke: in this formulation, the situation does determine utterances, but the situation itself must first be perceived by some agent.

Vatz, Richard.
On Bitzer’s claim that the situation of Kennedy’s assassination “controlled” the following rhetorical responses: “This does not mean, however, that the situation ‘controlled’ the response. It means that the communication of the even was of such consensual symbolism that expectations were easily predictable and stable.” (230). Vatz adds a social element with the use of the word “consensual”--I’m reminded of Symbolic Convergence Theory, which states that humans will converge around an event with similar attitudes, form similar responses, which become so formulated and conventional that they become “traditional” and thus expected. Vatz brings in “genre” and “recurring” as explanation for situations which seem to control their responses….which seems to correspond with Bitzer’s above explanation that “strong” and “clear” (to whom?) situations are easier to analyze. After all, it’s only “clear” when we are able to recognize, categorize, and theorize about it---which we can only do when it’s a recurrent event.


"Rhetorical"


Burke:
“Here I shall put down, as briefly as possible, as statement in behalf of what might be catalogued, with a fair degree of accuracy, as a sociological criticism of literature” (PLF 293) In what ways does KB really mean “rhetorical” here? Or have we rhetoricians coopted the materials of sociology in order to justify our practice and study? Is rhetoric now sociological? Is this a bid for legitimacy?

Bitzer:
Poetry is not rhetorical. However, the Declaration of Independence is. Presidential addresses are. Anything “spoken” is.
“Nor do I mean merely that rhetoric occurs in a setting which involves interaction of speaker, audience, subject, and communicative purpose. This is too general, since many types of utterances—philosophical, scientific, poetic, and rhetorical—occur in such settings” (3). Bitzer goes on to suggest other things the specifically “rhetorical” situation is NOT. His difficulty in defining the rhetorical could probably be alleviated if he were to recognize that most discourse, if not all, is rhetorical—it may not be public and formal-address-like, but still rhetorical. I’ll leave my frustrations with people who refuse to see that “aesthetic” is rhetoric at that.
“In short, rhetoric is a mode of altering reality…..by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action” (rhet sit p. 4).
Larson, Richard L. “Lloyd Bitzer’s ‘rhetorical situation’ and the Classification of Discourse” Phil and Rhet 3.3 165-168.
“Such distinctions between rhetorical and non0rhetorical discourse, however, quickly turn out to be slippery or, to state the point more positively the category of ‘rhetorical’ discourse embraces much more of what an ordinary person says and writes than Professor Bitzer’s article might at first suggest” (166) Expanding the rhetorical situation by expanding what counts as rhetorical: YAY! He also rescues poetry and scientific discourses from the abyss of “non”rhetorical discourse

Exigence


Bitzer:
“An exigence is rhetorical when it is capable of positive modification and when positive modification requires discourse or can be assisted by discourse” (Rhet Sit, p. 7) Positive? Hello progress narrative view of history!
Miller, Arthur B. “Rhetorical Exigence.” Philosophy and Rhetoric. (5) 1972 : 111-118. :
“Bitzer’s statements here and elsewhere suggest that an exigence is an identifiable something that acts to specify a speech to be given” (111). “Specify” here seems to indicate a determinism.
Vatz, Richard. :
“Bitzer seems to imply that the ‘positive modification’ needed for an exigence is clear. He seems to reflect what Richard Weaver called a ‘melioristic bias’ “ (227). Vatz argues here that Btizer’s view of exigence is based on a progress narrative—the view that there are “wrong” things that should be “fixed” to better society (perhaps toward a utopian state) and that rhetoric can change the situation for the “better” (ameliorate). Vatz criticizes Bitzer for his belief that the “situation is rhetorical only if something can be done.”—the bias towards agency and “action” in a traditional political/public policy sense is inherent in Bitzer’s definition of what is “rhetorical” in the first place—public speeches, presidential oratories, eulogies, constitutional documents. Is it not rhetorical if there is a negative modification reaction?
Vatz would like to reverse many of Bitzer’s formulations: “For example, I would not say ‘rhetoric is situational,’ but situations are rhetorical; not ‘exigence strongly invites utterance,’ but utterance strongly invites exigence; not ‘the situation controls to rhetorical response,’ but the rhetoric controls the situational response….” (229). I agree with most of these, particularly when utterance invites exigence—we’ve seen this in Bush’s War on Terror recently. It also, as Vatz notes, puts us back in the drivers seat, morally: when we “view rhetoric as a creation of reality or salience rather than a reflector of reality’ we end up assuming much more “responsibility for the salience’ we create.



Audience

Bitzer
“Properly speaking, a rhetorical audience consists of only those persons who are capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change” (8). How limiting is this, really? Aren’t we all capable of being mediators of change, atl east here in the US? Perhaps there are some slave populations that aren’t capable—but even people with “disabilities’ are able to effect some kind of change, even if it isn’t the desired or intended kind. Bitzer again seems to be imagining only the traditional oratory situation, and that’s far too narrow for what we do today. Later in this paragraph, he details how scientific discourse is also not rhetorical because the scientist can “express or generate knowledge without engaging another mind” (8)—which we know Burke would disagree with as well as many others, and rightly so. What is at stake when we limit our audiences in theories?


Situational con/re-straints

Miller, Arthur B.:
“On the other hand, when a hearer’s constraints combine with his perceptions of actions, phenomena, or facts, the result is the hearer’s perceived exigence: the basis of his expectations as he listens to the speaker” (117). This short quote is doing a lot. First, Miller is emphasizing the subjective nature of exigence: it Is only as much as it is Perceived As. Second, he is adapting the idea of constraints: it is not just the constraints upon the speaker, because as the speaker speaks, the situation inevitably changes; the listener, as perceiver, has his/her own constraints to work within—his own desires to be symbolically expressed and fulfilled. What Miller especially adds is the idea of genre as constraint on both the listener and the speaker: Expectations, formed from experience with recurring and repeated situations and their responses re/constrain what the speaker can say and how the listener can hear it.

Sticks and Stones

Sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will fuck you up, too.

From Burke's PLF.
Social structures give rise to "type" situations, subtle subdivisions of the relationships involved in competitive and cooperative acts (293-4). But are these structures deterministic? (de-term-inistic). Do they determine our response?

In what ways are all situations rhetorical?

Not determinative, but presupposes the appropriate action(s). The situation itself provides modes of conduct and possible names for it. But the "situation" is made up of audiences, "places" (which are created by the people around them), "historical facts" (which are the perceptions of the people recording them). The situation is a container for action.

Usability

Krug, Steve. Don't Make Me Think! Indianapolis, IN: New Riders Publishing, 2000.

"But even then, if the document is longer than a few paragraphs, we're likely to print it out because it's easier and faster to read on paper than on a screen" (22). Ah, the return of the E-Book debate. Book 2.0. What do we do with this, when online communities are only textual (for now?) and text is "noisy"? Krug says "We don't read pages. We scan them," and this is true for the "information" based websites Krug is designing. But what about those websites that don't just disseminate, but create? Is this where the "drabble" and "flashfic" came from? Is it the amount of text as a whole, or the amount of text per section (as in posts to blogs)?

"Happy talk must die" (46) wherein "happy talk" are the introductory welcoming messages that we hate to write, and hate to read. But these are also conventions which he *likes*. Welcome tags are "basically just a way to be sociable" (46)--well, isn't that what we want, for social websites?

On Bookmarking: When we want to return to something on a Web site, instead of relying on a physical sense of where it is we have to remember where it is in teh conceptual hierarchy an retrace our steps. This is one reason why bookmarks--stored personal shortcuts--are so important and why the Back button accounts for somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of all Web clicks.

We should change the Welcome! to a Start Here! tag.

The myth of the Average User:
"The belief that most Web users are like us is enough to produce gridlock in the average Web design meeting. But behind that belief lies another one, even more insidious: the belief that most Web users are like anything" (136).

COM632: Jenny Preece, Online Communities

Preece, Jenny. Online Communities. West Sussex, England: John Wiley and Sons, 2000.

Preece's text is a merger of four perspectives (sociology, technology, virtual worlds, E-commerce) that examines what makes a good online community--how it ticks. The mixed perspective allows her to move easily across disciplinary lines and address the multiple problems online interaction brings us. At times, it can feel like a how-to book (techne), at other times, an intro to online community theory, and still at other times, a discussion space for the discipline (particularly in methodology). Still, it is not a schizophrenic read--in fact, it is an easy read, and I'm afraid I'll miss something subtle. So, the pulled out quotes below will hopefully highlight what I think is important--that which is not already on Dr. Matei's lecture notes.

In many ways, this feels somewhat like a self-help book to me--many good, but abstract ideas, with little concrete information. Yes, good design is essential. Yes, we must find user-oriented design. But what does that mean? And how can she fill a whole book with lists and bullet points of what seems to be fairly obvious? Or am I just so embedded in design culture, in internet culture, in online communities in general, that these only seem obvious to me? Who, exactly is her audience, and what level of expertise do they have?

---

"The collective purpose of a community, the goals and roles of the individuals in a community, and the policies generated to shape social interaction all influence social interaction in the community. Sociability is concerned with these issues" (Intro, p. 7)

"Each community is unique, and there is no guaranteed recipe for a successful community. However, developers can influence the way a community develops by carefully communicating its purpose and policies" (7)

Her definition of "online community" is interesting. Four parts: "People" interacting "socially"; a "shared purpose"; policies; and Computer systems. I think hers is the first to include the technology as part of the definition, rather than comparing online community to social scientific definitions of "real" community. This shows, a the outset, a different way of thinking. However, on p 11, she notes that there is still the problem of absent physical presence, and that good "sociable" design is what helps smooth it over.

See the list on p. 13 and the additional list on p. 14

A note against Utopianist thinking in online community theory discussions: "Yet physical communities do not always function well and to the advantage of all, or even the majority, of their members. So why assume that online communities will do any better? It's easy, but dangerous, to assume that all communities are good" (20).

Preece addresses the "threat" the nonphysical space of cyberspace poses to "real" relationships, to "social capital and society" (22). The "Carnegie Mellon study" seems to raise questions about antisocialism and the internet, about isolation. Preece simply says that we developers must be 'aware' (THERE'S THAT WORD AGAIN) of this potential, and should "raise awareness" (EURGH!) among participants of this tendency. Of course, awareness won't do any good, if you're sitting at home, on your computer 6 days a week, highly aware that you aren't doing any good in the "real" world, but quite happy about it.

Oooh, some PoMo!
"Most definitions treat community only as an entity; in fact, community is a process (Fernback, 1999). Communities develop and continuously evolve. Only the software that supports them is desgined. Thus, the role of a community developer is analogous to that of the mayor of a new town, who works with town planners to set up suitable housing, roads, public buildings, and parks, and with governors and lawyers to determine local policies" (26).

On Health Communities: Yep, I recognize the genre. And I HATE reading the fibro ones.

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Chapter 5: Research Speaks to Practice: Interpersonal Communication

Oh, it's social science.
"Social Presence Theory"--"addresses how successfully media convey a sense of the participants being physically present, using face-to-face communication as the standard for assessment [yeah, cause that always works]. Social presence depends not only on the words people speak but also on verbal and non verbal cues, body language, and context" (150). See readings from Oct 15 for more. See also: Media Richness Theory.

She assumes that "social presence fundamentally affects how participants sense emotion, intimacy, and immediacy" (151). I'm most interested in immediacy--to be without medium, without barriers between the I and Thou. How platonic these assumptions are! How we fill in social cues online is interesting--they assume we don't, but I'm fairly sure we do. See her notes on "self-disclosure" and self-disclosure reciprocity (154). "Psychologically, the more people discover that they are similar to each other, thus, the more they tend to like each other, thus the more they will disclose about themselves" (154).

"Filtering out social cues impedes normal impression development." NORMAL????? (153).

Oh, gender! And gender bending! She's only scratching the surface of Queering potential online, but I guess that has to do with her audience and purpose. Damn.

Common Ground (156-164).
This section interests me most, as a Burkeian and as a fangirl. The phrase we're going with is "Common Ground Theory" (oh, come on! Get creative!) and it "determines how two people or a small group validate that they understand each other. There must be common referents ("my" or "that" or "now")--synchronicity. Different media allow different ways to ground (invite consubstantiality)

1. Co-presence (physical)


2. Visibility (physical and video)


3. Audibility (physical and audio)


4. Cotemporality (immediacy)


5. Simulatneity (messages can be sent and received instantaneously--experiencing the same thing at the same time--like watching MTV together while chatting).
   Sequentiality (people take turns, establishing time)


6. Reviewability (go back and see what happened, dude! Or edit?)


7. Revisability (wikiality)

Grounding and Empathy
Empathy is most visible between people with similar experiences. "The more similar people are, the less they have to 'go outside themselves' to gather cues; hence the more readily the can respond naturally to their circumstances" (164). Oh? Naturally???????

"There is, however, no research on the relationship between common ground and empathy, though it seems likely that when socioemotional (HUH?) content is involved, establishing common ground is aided by empathy, or vice versa." 164. I go with the "vice versa".