On Pain, or Amy thinks too hard lately

Apparently, I've been thinking about things without knowing it, again. I remember the first time this happened; I was taking yet another exam at Johnathan Daniels School in Keene, NH, where experimental education programs were running rampant (my first grade classroom had no walls--literally). I was taking the exam, some kind of math test with word problems that I would later recognize as testing pre-algebra skills. The test, like most of these government-sponsored standardized exams, was multiple choice. I read the problem, and instantly knew the answer was B. It was quite clear that there would be three chickens left, although when later asked by the teacher, I couldn't tell her why or how I had come to such a conclusion. Or how I had come to any of my conclusions. Something was working subconsciously or even unconsciously in my brain, and I let it happen.

I let it happen a lot, actually. When Mom was studying aloud for nursing school, droning on about rhizomes and the Kreb's Cycle, I listened while playing Tetris. And then aced science tests without studying for them straight through Anatomy and Physiology. When I hit college, this ability became less important as an English major--reading aloud helped my brain memorize things, but understanding why was often more important than knowing that and I ended up studying like normal kids. It wasn't until I got into heavy literary theory that I realized my brain was still doing its thing, just on a different level. I read Foucault and Derrida and Cixous out loud, I read them silently, I read and read the same passages until I thought my eyes were going to bleed, and still didn't understand them. Then I'd go to bed, or get up to get more coffee, and the answer would be so clear, skipping me past several steps of logical inquiry right to the end. I think that annoyed Lou and Kari, because I got it, but couldn't tell them what I meant.

Lately I've been reading about Burke and ontology, Burke and subjectivity, Burke and epistemology--none of which really relate to my dissertation, but there are a few things I can pull. Somewhere in the fog of synthesizing all of this, namely Monday night, I saw how the pieces fit, and wondered at my earlier confusion. What the hell, Amylea? Why was it all a mess before? I set to rearranging my chapter into something more reflective of my major concerns and moved on to cleaning it up.
Then, in the middle of reading about Burke and various social theories (from Marx to Althusser to Foucault) by Robert Wess, I started thinking about pain. It seemed kind of random, except that I'm hurting--but that's not unusual. But I wasn't dwelling on my own pain, but on the language of pain, in a Burkeian sense. Is not, I wondered, pain the ur-motive? Isn't "pain" really what we are talking about when we discuss "dystopian" fiction--the stories of pain? Thus I began putting forth some propositions:

1. 
   Pain is the name for a situation, or more accurately, an agon to a situation.


2. Pain is not an action, but motion, forced response to stimuli that moves us.


3. The discourse of pain shows us the dialectic of the body--what is inus and what is of us, what we have, and what we are. Pain itself is dialectical; it divides as much as it unites.


4. Pain is scenic: it is the grounds of (for some of us) our existence.


5. Pain is a habitus in the Bourdieuxian sense. Thus those who are pained have a different orientation, different bodily lived life, and thus must have different rhetorical motives.


6. Pain is thus a subject position.


7. Society at large provides us with narratives for overcoming pain, but inasmuch as "society" does not come from the grounds of pain, it cannot encompass for us (provide equipment for living) the situation.

Now, what these exactly mean, that's a project for another time.

The Rhetoric of Fan Studies: PCA/ACA 2009, Draft 1

The Popular and the Permanent: The Rhetoric of Fan studies (v2.2) Comments welcome!

Popular and Permanent: The Rhetoric of Fan Studies
Presented at PCA/ACA National Conference 2009
April 9, 2009
New Orleans, LA

I hid in the closet of fandom for years. My Master's degree was survived mainly by secretive late night forays into fic and vid and art and dubs--consuming fanworks to relax after Derrida. But why did I have to be so secretive? Fandom has always had some social stigma, perhaps best exemplified by the Simpson's character Comic Book Guy: a fat slob living at home, sad and lonely, too immersed in his fantasy worlds to attempt the performance of Normal that the rest of us partake in. Today I want to talk about that stigma, how it appears in academic conversations, and ways that we might legitimate the study of fandom(s) without resorting to "the popular" as our justification. Specifically, I want to suggest there are significant tensions in the language of fan studies: First, there is an unacknowledged dissonance in our language about fandom that stems from the difference between popularity and fanaticism. Second, there is a tension created by the language of popularity that categorizes fandom as somehow both “mass” and “unique,” both mainstream and eccentric. What results from these tensions is first a sense that a fandom is a legitimate object of study only for what it can show us about mass media, consumption, identity formation and the like. But in this assumption, the fans themselves and the products of fandom are still somewhat trivial (if not downright silly) and will disappear once the object of that fanaticism is no longer in the public eye.

Fandom is nothing new--and I'm even talking pre-Trek here, long before a person like Comic Book Guy could even exist and subsist within a society. Fiction in confluence with a middle class and industrial-print culture seems to create fandom as it grows, with the Pamela fandom of the 1740s as our earliest archived example. I’ll talk about the importance of archiving as legitimation later, but for now let us just say that fan studies might be said to be as old as the first critics of The Novel in general, those who spoke of silly little girls too busy reading to do their proper (house)work. In her book Consuming Pleasures Jennifer Pool Hayward examines fandom through the lens of serial production--and we might say that fandom is necessarily drawn to serial texts, if we were to make such broad generalizations. In tracing Dickens fandom, Hayward examines the pleasures of consuming a serial text, giving value to such a study by invoking a Marxist critique: Fandom in the past is important because it can show us cultural modes of production, movements of ideologies, and creation and maintenance of hegemony, particularly of the gendered sort.

My concern today is not with the studies of fans in the past, for many of these give value to the fandom by pointing to, not surprisingly, the permanence, artistry, and worthiness of the original text. Popularity and “mass“ audiences often characterize these fan works, which are not noted for their own intrinsic value as fan texts, but for what they can show us about the spirit of the age in which they were created. Aside, perhaps, from Joseph Andrews and his parody Shamela, no one I've met or read in "early" fan studies refers to a fan-writer by name or an exemplary fan-work by its title. By merging “popular” with “fanaticism,” we can study fandom as an interesting, but temporary phenomenon that emerges from the texts they reference. I wish to suggest that, at least in the digital era, fandom is not as dependent on the text it adores, but has created itself to be a nearly independent system of knowledge creating and knowledge sharing that can sustain itself across multiple, transient media events.

I am limiting my discussion to the fandom of the late 1990s through today because, true to our assumptions about the fickle nature of popularity, earlier fan works have been lost to us. The transience of fan works and fandom in general is part of what makes it a difficult object to study. The lack of an archive or a canon that can serve as what Latour and Woolgar call “immutable mobiles,“ those documents that serve as a foundation of knowledge for a community and serve as constitutional documents that create the community from nothingness gives us no common base from which to speak, doubtlessly causes some of the disjuncture we feel in fan studies. Further, when popular culture became an object of study, it became so within a Marxist-Foucauldian framework of ideological control. In this case, what is popular is what is hegemonic, and what is hegemonic tends to be without value in academia, unless it is to analyze the ways in which a text is hegemonic (and therefore uncritical, manipulative, and bad). Horkheimer and Adorno (as well as countless pop psychologists and after school specials) tell us that popular media are dumbing us down, working to institutionalize us by entertainment, and, in general, is for uneducated fools whose attention flits to whatever shiny object the producers flash at us. While we here at the PCA attempt to argue against that, some of that language and its values tend to seep into our language anyway, and we begin to assume that fandom is synonymous with consumption and all that is new.

This language appears, however rationalized, in many fandom studies. Cornel Sandvoss provides the most complete critique of such language in his introduction to Fans: The Mirror of Consumption: “The Balance between structure and agency is…crucial to the academic analysis of fandom….In [many] approaches fandom is interpreted as a consequence of mass culture needing to compensate for a lack of intimacy, community and identity” (2). Further, Sandvoss questions the definition of fandom as identity formation, and instead provides his own, which I borrow, for the most part, here: “I define fandom as the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text” (8). As his examples, Sandvoss points to Joli Jenson for her examination of the language used in common parlance and in some academic writings. In “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization” Jenson reminds us of the psychological and medical explanations of fan-ish behavior--a pathology, an unfulfilled relationship, a Freudian error in the fan‘s upbringing (9). The scholarly accounts, however were few and far between when Jenson wrote in 1992, and the criticisms tend not to be from media scholars. Still, the language of pathology or deviance that Jenson cleverly pulls from multiple sources has remained in our language, even as fans came to describe themselves in the summer of 2007 as pirates (see post 4/15/08: The Symbolic and the Virtual Event, to be presented at NCA 2009).

Of course, Henry Jenkins remains our key scholar in fandom. In Textual Poachers and later in Convergence Culture, Jenkins emphasizes the unique aspect of certain fandoms, what Sandvoss calls an “assumed uniqueness” that characterizes most fan studies. Jenkins might be the first to treat online fan works as legitimate objects of study; he cites the URLs of specific works and larger communities with the same academic rigor that the rest of us give to Dickens and Shakespeare. Like many fan scholars, Jenkins emphasizes the subversivness of fandom without acknowledging the tension between fanaticism and subversion, between “mass” media and counter-culture.
Several volumes of fan studies have emerged in recent years, and like Jenkins, they remain enthusiastic about the potential scholarly work available to fandom scholars, but continue to use language that celebrates the ex-centricity of fandom, emphasizes the subversiveness of fan works, and mark fandom as Other. The introduction to Rhiannon Bury’s Cyberspaces of Their Own notes the connection of fandom to oral culture and domestic storytelling that skews fandom demographics toward the female gender. The book surveys and analyzes certain communities that the author notes are dominated by women and tries to explain the need for and the pleasure in such activities. In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, the editors (including Sandvoss), dedicate the introductory chapter to “Why Study Fans?“ The editors try to summarize “three generations of fan scholarship over the past two decades” to come up with their answers, which include the subversive nature of fandom, the economic power of fandom that has television producers salivating for our attention, fandom as a mirror for what Bourdieu calls “habitus,“ and, more currently, fandom as “a cultural practice tied to specific forms of social and economic organization” (8-9). Neither Bury nor the authors of Fandom are too concerned with the connection of fandom to “popularity;” instead, these studies mark fans as an object (and as such, necessarily Others the fans) to be studied for what we can learn about larger cultural movements or human nature in general.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with Othering fans this way; fans themselves embrace this designation in their t-shirts, in their icons, in their posts that include some kind of self-disclosure. Whether we Other fans as subversive agents against mass culture or dismiss them as blind, adoring audiences, fans and fandom will and have survived in one form or another. In fact, “survival” of fandom may be one way we can begin to think of fan works as more than temporary manifestations of a fad. The connection of fandom to “popular” culture hinders us here--how can something be both popular and permanent?

The unstated criticism is that fan works, as non-legitimated narratives, exist only within a localized community and then only briefly. In the days of zines and snail mail fic and vid exchanges, few copies were made, and even fewer were available to outside readers. Without the backing of a publisher or producer, fan works tend to first shine brightly then fade from our consciousness. Without an (published) anthology to catalogue them, fanworks do not have a canon for academic study. Imagine trying to teach a class on fandom that focuses on the fan-produced texts themselves--what to include? The "textbook" as Bernadette Longo reminds us in Spurious Coin, is a legitimating tool in academia--a guide for what to teach, why to teach it, and what is teachable. Likewise, anthologies symbolically inscribe a field and guide scholars towards what is acceptable, even good, text. Despite the growing number of fan-scholars, scholar-fans, and scholars of fandom, we have no central, legitimated field. So where might we look, if we were to teach such a class or (God forbid?) create such a field?

First, we would probably find key authors in fandom--most likely those that write across many fandoms or those who are the most read. Perhaps the most celebrated fic (and some would argue, fic writer) in slash fandom comes from Speranza. “Written by the Victors” is, as one fan put it “what fanfic should be.” The 330K file is a long fic, coming in at several thousand words. More importantly, Speranza gives us a new genre that represents the core desires of fandom: to make the fandom world more present, more real, more encompassing, and to change that world as we see fit. “Victors” or the “VictorsVerse” tells a fairly standard Stargate: Atlantis story, an imagined universe where the crew on Atlantis officially split from Earth and form their own culture--a culture that allows for explorations into otherwise improbable romantic plots that facilitate slash relationships. In Victors, however, Speranza does not provide the standard narrative, but tells the story through quotes from books on the history of the Atlantis expedition. Of course, these books are not any more real than Atlantis itself, but Speranza’s authoritative academic voice makes these excerpts believable. An incident that would have perhaps been a chapter of a long fanfic is thus described through a quote from “Tina Eber,” author of the book The Atlantis Chronicles, Volume 2, page 37:

While we will never know for sure what happened on the evening of 17 January 5 A.T, we can make several educated guesses. It is probable, despite William Summerville's analysis in "The SGC's Real Target?" (Journal Of Political Diplomacy, OUP: 2010), that John Sheppard was the object of the attack. It is likely that Armitage planned to ambush or otherwise surprise Sheppard; Armitage's military record, as well as her preference for knives, shows a distinct predilection for stealth. It is also likely that McKay stumbled upon or otherwise interrupted her approach; it is unlikely that he would have sustained the degree of injury Royce witnessed if Sheppard had been in the fight. Royce's description accords with McKay having made a brave, if clumsy, grab for the knife while Sheppard's back was literally or metaphorically turned; it is not unreasonable to speculate that his injuries were sustained almost immediately as Armitage tried to ward him off. (“Victors” Book 3).

“Victors” has spawned a “VictorsVerse” that features both standard fan works and styles similar to what Speranza has done. What is important about this particular fic is the response it has elicited from the community: it has been bookmarked on Delicious by a thousand people, recommended in multiple fandoms, and, in general, recognized as one of the best scifi fics ever.
The fact that so many fans recognize Speranza (by her several online nicknames) as a key writer for the community is another way, I think, fandom can be seen as more permanent than other aspects of popular culture. Victors has captured the attention of the fan community as a whole--not just SGA fans. And any fan entering the SGA fandom will be recommended (recc’d) this story. "Victors," and other similar iconic fics, show the start of a canon for Stargate fandom and fandom as a whole.

Of course, the problem with fandom, even one as wide as the Stargate fandoms, is that it is tied to an original text, and once that original text disappears from the public eye, we would expect--assuming a close tie between the popular and the fanatic--the fandom to die as well. And in some ways this is true; enthusiasm for a given text dials down as new texts enter the media stream and our consumer consciousnesses.

Sandvoss’s definition of “sustained interaction” with a text only applies while the fandom is in vogue. In his definition both in the introduction and later in his book, fandom is still highly transient; it is the fan that remains the same. When interest dies, the fandom dies. But in many cases, most notably, the Buffyverse, Due South, and Star Trek, the original text is several years (if not decades) dead, while the fandom surges on. The ease of file bootlegging and DVD boxed sets allows for new fans to join, and many fans follow each other from one fandom to the next, creating relationships that extend beyond a single fandom. And jumping into an older fandom is easy, as I found out last summer when I consumed the whole of Due South in about a week. For example, using recommendation lists, newcomers can easily locate the most proliferous members and the most celebrated fan texts of that fandom. Major authors begin to emerge after a few minutes of research: Cassandra Clare, SuEric, Speranza, and Aristide, top may lists if quality writers

And most of their works in fact can be found with relative ease, thanks to an almost fevered effort to catalogue, categorize, and archive the fics of a fandom. Websites like the LiveJournal-hosted “dsficfinders” allows users to request help finding such works--all an inquiring fan has to do is describe what they remember about a favorite fic, and the community responds with suggestions within 24 hours--usually within an hour or two. Fans can even describe elements they want to read in a story, and the community will recommend the best version they know.

In Harry Potter fandom, Fictionalley features an overwhelming archive of fan works. Larger, multiple fandom sites such as fan fiction.net and mediaminer.org host thousands upon thousands of fic and art and poetry and snippets of conversation that would have, in the days of mimeographs and mailing lists, long been rotting in a landfill.

When LiveJournal purged several dozen communities in the summer of 2007, fans were outraged for the loss of years of conversations, “inscribed” proof of their lives and communities. The fics could be replaced (and they were, since many fans stored their favorites on separate thumb drives or email accounts), but the textual evidence, the immutable mobiles that made the fandom more than just a momentary enthusiasm, was gone. Using archives (and now, carefully backed-up archives) allows a fandom to subsist long after the object of its attention has faded from the public eye.

The inscription of fandom into texts and archives suggests that associating fan studies with popular culture may be, for now, a mistake. As “pop culture studies” grows, it will, probably, throw off some of the assumptions of transience and frivolity, and maybe even “mass.” Fandom is not, and cannot be both a part of mass media--that is, a part of the “mainstream” and part of the ex-centric, and it is time we stop looking at fandom as such. I’ve only begun to list here some of the processes that are now helping fandom become more permanent, more legitimate, and hopefully others can add those I am not aware of. Comments, like in fandom, are always welcome.

____________________________

Bury, Rhiannon. Cyberspaces of Their Own. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005.
Hayward, Jennifer Poole. Consuming Pleasures. Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.
“Introduction: Why Study Fans?” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. Eds Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. New York: New York University Press, 2007.
Joli, Jensen. “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. London: Routledge, 1992.
Latour, Bruno. “Drawing Things Together.” Representation in Scientific Practice. Eds Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. 19-68. Reprinted at www.bruno-latour.fr. 9 April 2009. 4 April 2009.
Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.
Speranza. “Written By The Victors.” 2007. Accessed 9 April 2009. See also “VictorsVerse Art and Artifacts.” Accessed 9 April 2009.

Settling Accounts

On accounting

I've been a member of the internet-addicted community for some years now; it was March of 1996 that I got my first modem-enabled computer dialing up to speeds of 14.4K (!). I was hooked. It was like a drug; the coding, the chatrooms, the web searches that required a gentle hand and a clever mind. But online communities, the heart of the internet's popularity explosion, around since the WELL's inception (and conception) in 1984, were not really a part of my world; most were hosted by Prodigy and AOL and required fees to join. A few interfaces such as IRC created "channels" or chatrooms in which individuals could converge and ramble on about their lives, but IRC, unlike today's communities, was more fluid: users had multiple "nicks" and could change nicks at will, and you were never really sure about who you were talking to--I mean, sure, you could find out their IP address, the name of the server hosting the channel, their ping time, etc, but as for the person behind the nick, well, you could be anyone, including creepy voyeurs and pedophiles.

I don't remember my first "account" creation that gave me a stable internet presence. It might have been my hotmail, but definitely by the time I got my Yahoo! email, I had registered on several sites--a lot of them for casual games, a few on early blog-like sites. Today I have so many accounts, I can't account for them all. There's my credit card company account, my Papa Johns account, my Amazon.com account, Shockwave, various fan sites, facebook, delicious, my blog, my various emails and IM accounts, WebCT, job search engines, my MLA and PCA memberships, some more casual games sites, Bluffton Alumni...etc etc etc. There are accounts for sites that don't really account anything (such as Icanhascheezburger.com), and accounts that are attached to my bank accounts security sensitive accounts (like mypurdue).

Derrida says that postmodernism is marked by an "archive fever," a need to constantly count and account for (accompter) people, places, and things by rendering them into text--that permanent, substitution-vehicle that stands in for us long after we're gone. What does it meant to have an "account," then, but to re-iterate and re-cite one's own self-hood, to nominate yourself as part of a count, to ask to belong to a certain set? To call oneself into being through text, through the legitimating power of an email address--after all, most accounts require you to prove your identity or confirm your account by responding to an email sent by the automated program. Yes, I am real. Yes, I exist.

These "accounts" name us, they classify us as members, and they give us a place within a larger schema. They, not surprisingly, mirror many of the usually hidden aspects of language and governance, making them transparent. Who are you? When were you born (i.e. are you a legal adult)? What do you look like (in the case of avatars)? How can others identify you? Substitution upon substitution that makes us "present" online, that presents us online, that re-presents us to the world. The text and image stand in for us, they reserve our place among the counted.

Presence and presentation are, of course different. One can still create multiple accounts with the same site. One could change one's avatar to be older, younger, a different gender, blonde, fat, thin, elfin, wizard, troll, or sheep. Clever people have created MySpace pages for everyone from Hitler to Heidegger, Aristotle to Zola, and yes isn’t it cool how digital “presence” shows us that all identity is a performance. But for those less overtly ironic identities, those accounts we take seriously, the ones that are supposed to equate presence and presentation for operations in the “real” world--what does it say of us, this endless profiling, selecting, electing and editing of our selves into text, into image? Into something that will remain long after ourselves (thanks to the Internet archive project)? Does blogger.com really need to know my gender? My state of residence? My likes, dislikes, favorite quotes and movies?

Part of me gets frustrated with the multiple username/passwords I have to remember every day. Part of me wants to create a universal ID that allows me to log-in efficiently to every site or community I am a member of. Then the dystopian imagination kicks in, and I think of the Mark of the Beast, of Big Brother tracking my purchases, my involvement, my movements across cyberspace. Paranoia is another condition of postmodernity, and it is also a condition of a dystopian imagination.

For now, I suppose I’ll do like everyone else, and use the same two or three web identities for everything, the same password with variations, for everything. So if you see an unwiredmascot or a pandoratrue somewhere, it’s most likely me. It’s just easier to keep account of accounts this way.

(re)Unions

A few nights ago, I got to talk to Kari on Facebook (sucky sucky sucky chat interface), pretty much for the first time since she departed my place in August. We caught up (sort of, thanks to the interface) and exchanged stories of woe about our current geographical locations. It's no secret I have wanted out of Lafayette pretty much since I moved here--and that my displeasure with my surroundings has affected both my mood and my physical state negatively. Not only am I further behind on paperwork than ever, but I owe Purdue mucho dinero. I am also 18 months away from being without funding, and this has me quite concerned on many fronts. Despite the need to be here, be present, be focused (be filling out paperwork), I've been more and more absent, and we can thank the Interwebs for that.

And on the Interwebs, Kari mentioned missing her high school reunion, for lack of communication. It seems strange to me that a class would hold a reunion in the summer before the 10th anniversary of graduation, but, hey, whatev. My own 10 year reunion will be held sometime this summer, I think, if Mr. Greg Humrichouser manages to get it together. And, I just might go. After all, I may have gained weight since high school, but in general, I've been successful. Ish. I'm not un-successful. Or at least I won't be, if I get the paperwork in.

Of course, all this talk of reunions got me thinking about the cultural purpose of reunions...which for me, begins with the word "reunion" itself. Deconstructionists like "re" words and "de" words because we can play with language--in this case, I think I'd be correctly channeling Derrida if I were to discuss the idea of re-uniting as requiring an idea of original unity, as privileging unity, togetherness, and community identification, which is strange in a late capitalist society.

Oops. Jameson snuck in there. Damn.

The idea of unity, is, of course, highly Platonic in nature. Aristotle (who I know is not Plato, but go with me on this) discussed the Unities of Tragedy--of time, of place, and of plot. To unite means to be one, and yet, the verb implies a process of many "ones" entering into One--many kinds and versions of Human entering into the ideal, complete Form of Humanity. As though we are not whole until we are united, and yet reunion implies that we can, in fact, be separated, be functional, be parts of other unions. Are you ever Not a member once you become one?

On Facebook, I found an old classmate from Ashland Christian School, who is apparently a well-adjusted individual. I wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to hold an ACS reunion--are we still a "class"? A whole unit, working as one in order to...to what? As a functionalist, I look to define things by how they operate, what they do. (That which washes that which we wear). What defines a class as a unit, once that unit has been dispersed? And, as Badiou might ask, who instigates the "count" that calls us to reunite, the count that creates a reunion, that recreates a union? How can there be a State to instigate the count, when that which initiated the original union has since graduated, progressed, moved on, to other counted groups?

I have implied that Greg Hummrichouser is responsible for initiating the (re)count for our class, because we elected him long ago. But the "we" that elected him do not exist again until he calls us into being again--but he cannot call us into being as The State, because we, his constituents do not exist until he calls us.

Here is the problem: Either reunions must call their parts into existence from a sort of nothingness, or that once united, a class is never really disbanded. Sadly, I prefer the first. Because being a member of ACS was bad enough when we were physcially present at the geographical location associated with that organization. My baggage is heavy enough.

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.

The End of the World: Prelim studying

The End of the World. Eds Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, Joseph Olander. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983.

Introduction: Rabkin

"The modern popular literature of the end of the world continues humanity's permanent questioning of its place and its permanent quest for a reason to exist. We forever reimagine the pligrimage in and out of history, seeking the well at the world's end, to drink the knowledge the gods withheld from Adam" (vii). Rabkin connects the apocalyptic impulse in art to the existentialist quest--how, though, does the resulting art provide that knowledge, enact that quest, create that history for its readers? What do the books *do*, not what do they explore or explain. How do they work on their readers to either provide an answer or to provide an echoing feeling of nothingness?

"When the world ends, what really ends is not all of creation but--only--the world as we know it" (viii). And the "as we know it" includes, most importantly, all thsoe little acts of human creation--art, literature, the buildings of cities, the social hierarchies of communities. This is what we despair at in dystopian fictio: The loss of the humanities, the death of the liberal arts. For without these, we are absent from the universe; we might as well have not existed, if not for the trace of being left in our creations. Fahrenheit 451 is most explicit about this, in making each person a book and a book each person. And what of the dystopian books themselves? They fortell of their own destruction, they warn of the loss of their warnings. They stand between Us and their own destruction.

Ch 1: Gary K Wolfe. The Remaking of Zero: Beginning at the End

"As in most post-holocaust fiction, the 'end of the world' means the end of a way of life, a configuration of attitudes, perhaps a system of beliefs--but not the actual destruction of the planet or its population" (1). This, I think, is the difference between dystopian and post-apocalyptic fictions--in dystopian fiction, the world has ended as we know it, but humans flourish (perhaps too much!). In post-apocalyptic fiction, most of the world's population is gone, humanity itself has disappeared not just in the attitudes, values, and beliefs we now hold, but in body as well.

The BSG effect: "Although in one sense the very notion of beginning a narrtative wtih a climactic holocaust seems perverse, especially if the underlying tone of the novel is going to be optimisitc, such a fantsy is very much in keeping with tradition of millenarian thought" (3). What is missing here is a close reading of a text that can show *how* the texts create desire, how they persuade, create identifications with readers, what they argue, what answers they provide. What is the role of revelation? What is the mechanism of that optimism, that hope? (Note: Optimism--opt= eye, to see. Theory. To envision. To make present symbolically).

What is the pleasure of the text for the READER?

"On the simple level of narrative action, the prospect of a depopulated world in which humanity is reduced to a more elemental struggle with nature provides a convenient arena [TOPOI???] for the sort of heroic action that is constrained in the corporate, technological world that we know" (4). Wolfe goes on to describe other benefits this topoi provides the *writer*, but does not discuss the pleasure(s) for the reader. Yes, we all enjoy a good heroic story with clear cut good and evil, a simple story of pure survival, but I think the dystopian texts are more narratively complex than that, when we examine them through Brooks' idea of the arabesque nature of plots. It's not just the plot that matters, but the story--not the events that occur, but how they're told--that matters. It's the "stylized" part of Burke's "strategic answers, stylized answers" that gives us the equipment for living, that persuades us that this equipment is the right equipment. In other words, the flashback, the revelation, the backstory, is more important than the subsequent events. BSG is interesting not because we want to see them reach earth, but because we are given a future without a past, and a story that slowly reveals that past, piece by piece, episode by episode.

Ch 4 W. Warren Wagar "Round Trips to Doomsday."

"With the exception of a few modern men of science, writes Mircea Eliade, 'humanity has never believed in a difinitive end of the universe'....Ends that lead to fresh beginnings and further ends appear regularly in science fiction, reflecting some of the most characteristic anxieties and ideological paradigms of late industrial culture" (73). Jameson echoes this connection to late capitalism in his Archaeologies of the Future--certainly our socio-economic situation contributes to our attitudes toward history (it's our terministic screen)--but literary texts emerge from more than just an economic position.

This chapter would be helpful to explore BSG: All this has happened before and all this will happen again.

Ch 5 Brian Stableford "Man-made Catastrophes."

This chapter briefly addresses causality and links to Christian eschatology--I need to look at it further.

Ch. 6 W.W. Wagar "The Rebellion of Nature."

For comparing traditional literary natural apocalypses with Doctor Who's "Utopia"--what do both say about the nature of nature? Of history? Of our organizing of time? Of humanity's understanding of the infinite? Of Time?

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, 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

---

"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

---

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.