After last week, we can probably agree that "no"--it isn't. Vatz and Bitzer were talking inside the same "box," regarding the speaker, audience, and context as discrete parts, and the post-human is part of the movement which pushes us outside that box, wanting to argue that the parts are not, in fact, discrete.

This is akin to Edbauer's use of "bleeding" or "flux"

Gloss: "but everyone was wrong until me!"

This whole series of readings has been very sassy and self-important. Well . . . the way I'm reading them, they sound sassy.

This was almost exactly what Consigny said about his goal. I wonder if they were writing at the same time, since Biesecker is clearly not afraid of calling people out directly for the flaws she sees in their arguments.

I feel like I'm missing something here. Perhaps problems do not formulate themselves in a vacuum and the problems may not be well-posed, but there is a large degree to which problems occur outside of a rhetor's influence. The President might have the responsibility to determine what problems he should try to address, but that ignores the fact that the question of what to say at the inaugural address is itself a problem that formulated long before any individual President is born. Similarly, the problems he must choose to address likely formed outside of his control, as well.

Yet the one thing all three of them seem to agree upon is that the very term "situation" is unclear. Bitzer seems right to say that there is no standard meaning, and Consigny seems awfully self-righteous, here, considering his point is essentially "he was right, but in the wrong way!"

As with signifyin(g), practice and the social interchange with others are crucial.

As Byron is saying above, this is a really interesting new spin on embodiment and the connections between language and imagination. This feels a lot like Cixous' impassioned speaker.

Hey, Nathaniel, did you . . . did you by chance want to talk about love in the context of this reading? I just got this weird, uncanny sense you wanted us to think about love when I noticed it written in all caps in the margins for the third? fourth? time in this text.

So to make that connection explicit, this is a good example of the problem Corder was trying to address at the end of his piece, in which an earnest attempt to work out steadfast and competing narratives must come from a place of love, or will otherwise result in dissatisfaction/danger/subjection of one narrative.

[I know this is brief, so feel free to build on this gloss, guys]

This sounds a lot like Corder's final line, declaring that the only truly "free speech" would be garbled nonsense devoid of meaning.

This sounds a lot like Cixous' "Who am I? I am 'doing' French history." (Of course, Cixous goes on to emphasize the body a great deal, but this sounds like a more abstract appreciation of individuals as historically situated.

He is here discussing the prohibitions around the very topic, but of course there were doubly taboos on who could talk about the taboo subjects, and whose accounts of the matter were considered downright dangerous.

This is only one of many factors, but the materiality is--I think--crucial, and recalls Woolf's five hundred pounds a year.

This seems to link us back to the problem of embodiment, and those rhetors for whom the very fact of public speaking was an urgent political problem and social action. (Douglass, Palmer, Stewart, Grimke(s), etc.)

This idea seems similar to Nietzsche's that all language is a series of socially-agreed-upon lies.

I think Nathaniel is right to point out a gender problem, as he has in his marginal comment, here. However, I think we also see a class problem arising more starkly. Whereas before there was a certain "professionalization" automatically associated with teaching at the college level, the "respectability" teaching once granted has disappeared. Although he does not explicitly invoke the word "class," Weaver clearly feels that those who make up the "instructional staff" are low in stature and respectability. To be a little crass, this sounds an awful lot like Weaver is complaining about "the neighborhood going down hill," so to speak. Although the "instructional staff" presumably have some sort of authority and experience to earn this teaching role, Weaver sees their arrival as signaling the decline of rhetoric as he once knew it, rather than seeing it as a sign that rhetoric is becoming more accessible and that more groups of people are actively engaging in rhetoric.

Ah ha! So I guess this answers my question about the Burke reading. I had a hard time following the Burke, but Weaver's connection to Plato is obviously much clearer. (And Weaver in general is also much clearer.)

My mind immediately leapt to Woolf's rather graphic visualization of killing the Angel in the House. The timeliness did rather seem to underscore his point, here.

Although this particular quote is about women rhetors, this ties us back to our discussion of Douglass' choice of carefully-tailored personae during his lecture circuits.

It feels like we are finally getting to his most important point. This also seems related to Nietzsche, to an extent, in that to claim a "right" or "good" usage implies that we can improve on language by narrowing it, but this sort of view of language ignores that it's all just a system of metaphor.

It feels like this is a distinction between Nietzsche's social lies and anti-social lies. If I'm glossing this correctly, bona fide communications are those social lies which we have all agreed upon to enable communication. "Misdirection" is the anti-social lie for the purpose of trickery.

Lifted by Bain and Hill.

This reminds me of Douglass' argument that slavery was dangerous to whites as well as blacks because it corrupted even the most tender-hearted mistress. These sorts of appeals remind us that these rhetors are always thinking about the make up of their audience.

I'm confused about what this is referencing. Is this the same passage Palmer refers to when she argues that the Bible indicates men and women were present when the apostles gained the ability to speak in different tongues?

Another example of white male testimony being necessary for Othered bodies to be taken seriously, connecting us to Palmer, Stewart, the Grimkes, and Douglass last week.

In the Douglass piece someone made a comment about the ethos of the author. Here, the author seems to be asserting the truth, based on his knowledge as a translator, but then throwing in the towel when it comes to interpretation.

Nathaniel has drawn our attention to the phrase "ignorance will involve guilt," which I think is significant, but I also want to reflect on the idea that chiding for the wrongs of the past is not necessary because it was born of ignorance and that it is only the time (that is, the moment in which she was writing) which moves us from forgiveness to guilt in the audience. This seems like a similar move to Douglass when he posited that his mistress had been a good, tender-hearted person before she was poisoned by slavery. He called out slavery as a threat to white slave owners, just as Palmer here decries oppression of women will soon lead to a corruption of the souls of men who go on participating in it, once they have been stripped of their ignorance.

Here is that "mental and moral" argument referred to in The Rhetorical Tradition introduction to this section.

This is a partial answer to my concern about Stewart's speaking experiences. I wonder whether heckling (and its consequences) was better recorded against the Grimke sisters because they were white women (and therefore viewed as more fragile and worthy of protection).