wondering

Science does not have that kind of authority any more, assuming, and this is Scott’s important point, we should want for such an authority in the first place.

whiggish

concealing

We are not so much interested in the legitimacy of these site

'can't live without it'

Recently, Facebook tried to introduce Beacon, a program that would broadcast particular purchases on a user's news feed. This kind of covert advertising, what Ari Melber calls "social advertising," was soundly rejected by users (22). While the messages were touted as innocent recommendations, in actuality they served up commodification and commercialism at the expense of homemaking. By analogy, consider the effect of inhabiting a house with a subclause, more or less unbeknown to you, that allows marketers to publish your purchases as endorsements.

This "thinging" power can also be seen in Facebook's "suggestions" for friends. Much like Amazon.com's recommendations of books based on recent book-buying habits, Facebook suggests contacts based on one's current network. On one's profile page, Facebook lists "People You May Know," users who are potential contacts that Facebook has discovered based on one's existing connections. If you click through, Facebook will ask, "Do you know any of these people?

The gathering that Facebook performs is a form of rhetorical building

Facebook calls forth asynchronous conversations, geo-graphically impossible encounters, minutia of daily existence

bringing them into a false sense of belonging

online social networking

The fourth aspect of the fourfold, mortals, is perhaps obvious.

If things gather and bring the world, then digital things afford a subtly different world, not just a different web of ideological meanings within the world.

Then share the magic moments in beautiful books, colorful calendars, dazzling DVDs, perfect podcasts, and attractive online journals.

A "cyber-world" is seen as distinct from our own reality, and thus, the narrative goes, we operate through a different sense-even multiple senses-of self or identity (see Turkle and Stone)

This is a technological solution for a technological problem, and it comes forth from a desire for mastery

Heidegger describes a bridge as gathering the fourfold, he is also saying that neither the fact of humans building it, the purposes to which it is put, the roles it fulfills, nor even the full range of contexts in which it is or could be embedded suffice to capture the bridge in its bridgeness (Harman 124).

For all that we make them, they cannot be reduced to the facts of our making them.

The poetic language used accomplishes rhetorical work but does not lend itself to precision.

While Heidegger is commonly understood as offering a sustained critique of technology, it is less understood that he also offers concrete, affirmative proposals for dealing productively with the challenges technology sets forth. If he complains that "[n]ature becomes a gigantic gasoline station,"

Postmodernism requires human cognitive mapping; digital media require the orienting capacities of the human sensorimotor body

following function, preferring new architectural principals that amount to "a mutation in built space itself' (38). Jameson has received his share of criticism, of course, but what is important here is that the Bonaventure's organization o.fspace functions as a condensation of larger cultural and economic phenomena, most especially late capitalism, that is itself advanced in large part by new technologies and new media. These new spaces are reflective of a profound cultural disorientation. Jameson writes, "This latest mutation in space-postmodern hyper-space-has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of th

his hierarchy structures our relation to new media and the world it brings.

apitalist and/or economic interests.

with

interconnected stitchwork of things

im portant 0 b j ects and a sense of place

thereaderwouldcatchthemeaningofmyquestion

rhetoricalsituation

of Western thought, continually presenting us with the (skewed) choice between the plain un-varnished truth straightforwardly presented and the powerful but insidious appeal of "fine Ian

reflect

if men will only submit themselves to that language and remain within the structure of its stipulated definitions and ex-clusions, they will be incapable of formulating and expressing wayward, subjective thoughts and will cease to be a danger either to themselves or to those who hearken to them.

It is the view of the anti-rhetoricians that this double task of inner and outer regulation can be accomplished by linguistic reform, by the institu-tion of conditions of communication that at once protect discourse from the irrelevancies and con-tingencies that would compromise its universal-ity and insulate the discoursing mind from those contingencies and irrelevancies it itself harbors

audience

defects

but we must know the truth [and] we can admit no poetry into our city save only hymns to the gods and the praises of good men; for if you grant admission to the honeyed Muse ... plea-sure and pain will be lords of your city instead of law and that which shall ... have approved itself to the general reason as the best" (607a). The "honeyed muse" is precisely what Belia! be-comes when his tongue drops Manna

Plato against the poets in book X of his Republic

easie

ornaments

model of language abstracted from any particular performance, or in the project of Es-peranto or some other artificial language claim-ing universality,6 or in the fashioning of a Haber-masian "ideal speech situation" in which all assertions express "a 'rational will' in relation to a common interest ascertained without decep-tion,"1

linguistic machines of seventeenth-century "projectors"

a language from which all per-5Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scielllific Revo/111io11s (Chicago, 1962), p. 125. [Au.] spectival bias (a redundant phrase) has been eliminated, efforts that have sometimes taken as a model the notations of mathematics, at other times the operations of logic, and more recently the purely formal calculations of a digital com-puter

Nobody uses fine language when teaching geometry.

the way things are.

objective observer

outward

second

exists independently of all perspectives and points of view and the many truths

three basic oppositions:

inner/ outer, deep/ surface, essential/ peripheral, unmediated/ mediated, clear/ colored, necessary/ contingent, straightforward/ angled, abiding/ fleeting, reason/ passion, things/ words, realities/ illusions, fact/ opinion, neutral/ partisan.

Just in case you hadn't noticed

Born, it would seem, in a posture of defensiveness, rhetoric has often gravitated to-ward this latter view in an effort to defuse the charge that it is amoral

"seize the thing, the words will follow"

the skill of being able to make arguments on either side of a question: "This ... illustrates what is meant by making the worse argument appear the better.

and could make the worse appear / The better reason.

and in the Phaedrus the title figure admits that the "man who plans to be an orator" need not "learn what is really just and true, but only what seems so to the crowd" (260

rhetoric, the art of fine speaking, is all show, grounded in nothing but its own empty preten-sions, unsupported by any relation to truth.

"compos'd"

That is, he draws attention to his appearance, to his surface, and the suggestion of superficiality (a word to be understood in its literal meaning) extends to the word "act"; that is, that which can be seen.

oll call

1608 The essay "Rhetoric" that is reprinted here comes from Doing What Comes Nat-urally.

The only condition in which speech could really be "free" would be one in which speech meant nothing and was offered for no reason.

Except in the artificial en-vironment of a college seminar, all speech is rhetorical or instrumental, intended to accomplish something.

That po-sition is just as untenable, he argues, as the foundationalist position.

argument

force

Most importantly for Fish, there is no place to stand that is outside some context and set of presuppositions.

Rather, the text is a creation of the community, for what is there is what a particular community agrees or is con-strained to see there. This means that any interpretation that makes sense or is per-suasive is so only because it arises within and is directed to a community that sees or is willing to see the text through the same lens of assumptions about what counts as literature, or even about what words and phrases may mean.

The world wants the quick memo, the rapid-fire electronic mail service; the world wants speed, efficiency, and economy of motion, all goals that, when reached, have given the world less than it wanted or needed. We must teach the world to want otherwise, to want time for care.

When argument is taken as display or presentation, then it eventually becomes a matter of my poster against yours, with the prize to the slickest performanc

I don't know

the truth

our own narrative was wanting all along,

Argument, then, is not something we make outside ourselves; argument is what we are. Each of us is an argumen

consciously or not

There is only our making, sometimes by design, sometimes not. None of us lives without a history; each of us is a narrativ

a network

My communication must be repeatable

Such iter-ability-(iter, again, probably comes from itara, other in Sanskrit, and everything that follows can be read as the working out of the logic that ties repetition to alterity) structures the mark of writing itself, no matter what particular type of writing is involved (whether pictographical, hieroglyphic, ideographic, phonetic, alphabetic, to cite the old categories).

retracing

letter

Inversely, it is within the general domain of writ-ing, defined in this way, that the effects of se-mantic communication can be determined as ef-fects that are particular, secondary, inscribed, and supplement

context is never absolutely determinable, or rather, why its determination can never be en-tirely certain or saturated. This structural nonsat-uration would have a double effec

metaphoric displacement.

by an-alyzing or "deconstructing" texts that contribute to the metaphysics of presence

Rhetoric focused on motives for speaking that were not intended to reach the ab-solute truth.

Mendel was a true mon-ster,

There are two reasons for this: first of all, botany and medicine are made up of errors as well as truths, like any other discipline-errors which are not residues or foreign bodies but which have positive functions,

The organization of disciplines

The commentary-principle limits the chance-element in discourse by the play of an identity which would take the form of repetition and sameness.

what he sketches out, even by way of pro-visional drafts, as an outline of the oeuvre, and what he lets fall by way of commonplace re-marks-this whole play of differences is pre-scribed by the author-function, as he receives it from his epoch, or as he modifies it in hi

The infinite rippling of commentaries is worked from the inside by the dream of a repe-tition in disguise: at its horizon there is perhaps nothing but what was at its point of departure-mere recitation.

system of books,

Yet already a century later the highest truth no longer resided in what dis-course was or did, but in what it said: a day came when truth was displaced from the ritualized, ef-ficacious, and just act of enunciation, towards the utterance itself, its meaning, its form, its object, its relation to its reference.

when we ask the question of what this will to truth has been and constantly is, across our discourses, this will to truth which has crossed so many centuries of our history

lending an ear to a speech that is free at last,

noise

I should like it to be all around me like a calm, deep transparence, infinitely open, where others would fit in with my expectations, and from which truths would emerge one by one; I should only have to let myself be carried, within it and by it, like a happy wreck."

~ • ...:...1.L.... cf--1r~ -~•1-

It is a space of exteriority in which a network of distinct sites is deployed.

an obscure web of things, and a manifest, visible, colored chain of words; I would like to show that discourse is not a slen-der surface of contact, or confrontation, between a reality and a language (langue), the intrication of a lexicon and an experience; I would like to show with precise examples that in analyzing discourses themselves, one sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so tight, of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practice.

practice

The problem is to reveal the specificity of these discursive relations, and their interplay with the other two kinds.

tangle of traces

network

Part of the resistance against making decisions comes from our fear of giving up options.

straighten out the details of Falkland's turbulent history, rather than to condemn the man.

vindicates

he was a libertine

Maria falls in love with him via his marginalia.

The Wrongs of Woman begins in medias res

pend also for their effectiveness upon the purely technical means of communica-tion, which can either aid the utterance or hamper it. For a "good" rhetoric neglect

lM\tl t\o~ CaV\ ~e,\-()., lt.l--of. VJl>nt. d«'>f\l-\Ni~ o. "

ramifications of this one root.

dramatism

Our words for particular "jobs" under capitalist in-dustrialism refer to acts, but often the element of action is reduced to a minimum and the element of sheer motion raised to a maximum.

o protect must be commensurate with the threat-ened danger.

Machi-avelli complains that people read history without applying its lessons,

onsider with what fidelity she had set the scene for this pattern of severance as she stepped beyond the railing to make her announcement. Design: chairman and fellow members within the pale, sitting, without hats and overcoats-she outside the pale, standing, with coat over her arm preparatory to departure. She had strategically modified the arrangement of the scene in such a way that it implicitly (ambiguously) contained the quality of her act.

properties

For he could have "gone on" only by abandoning drama for some more "scientific" form.

And thereby, in his human-itarian zeal to save mankind, the novelist portrays characters which, in being as brutal as their scene, are not worth saving

The paintings of the pointillist Seurat carry the sense of consis-tency between scene and agent to such lengths that his human figures seem on the point of dis-solving into their background.

One could not deduce the details of the action from the de-tails of the setting, but one could deduce the quality of the action from the quality of the set-ting.

The Scene-Act Ratio

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord, Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff That beetles o'er his base into the sea.

Or imagine that one were to manipulate the terms, for the imputing of motives, in such a case as this: The hero (agent) with the help of a friend (coagent) outwits the villain (counteragent) by using a file (agency) that enables him to break his bonds (act) in order to escape (purpose) from the room where he has been confined (scene). In se-lecting a casuistry here, we might locate the mo-tive in the agent, as were we to credit his escape to some trait integral to his personality, such as "love of freedom."

ambiguity

"right" or "more nearly right."

Men may violently disagree about the purposes behind a given act, or about the charac-ter of the person who did it, or how he did it, or in what kind of situation he acted; or they may even insist upon totally different words to name the act itself.

language "defeats" reality.

In brief, we have to guess them and we guess much better when we realize we are guess-ing, and watch out for indications, than when we think we know.7

Good use is the general, present-day practice of the best writers." One bone we could pick would be with that "best." How are they the best writers except by using the words in the best ways? We settle that they are the best writers because we find them using their words successfully. We do not settle that theirs is the right, the "good usage" of the words because they use them so.

Jabberwocky

It was Aristotle who said that there can be no natural connection between the sound of any language and the things signi-fied, and, if we set the problem right side up and remember the other words before examining it, we shall have to agree with him.

imitate

It is as though we were to maintain that I apples are healthy because6 wise people eat them, instead of recognizing that it is the other way about-that it is what the food will do for us which makes us eat it, not the fact that we eat it which makes it good food.

I am talking now, you have usually to wait till I have gone on a bit before you can decide how you will understand the opening parts of the sentences. If, instead, 1 were reading you the firi,,t few theorems of Euclid, that would not be so. You would understand, as soon as I said "a tri-angle," what the word meant, and though what I went on to say might qualify the meaning ("hav-ing two sides equal"), it would not dei,,troy or completely change the meaning that you had so far given to the word. But in most prose, and more than we ordinarily 1,,uppm,e, the opening words have to wait for thrn,e that follow to settle what they shall mean-if indeed that ev

The written form gives words far more independence than they possess as units of sound in speech and we derive thence a habit of supposing that they have far more inde-pendence as regards their meanings than they usually have in either written or spoken dis-course.

I 5~ is behaving or·thinking with a concept-not, of course, of one. Its act is abstractive and general; disregards in some respects the fonner situations and so is abstractive, and applies in some re-spects not to one single thing but to any of a sort and so is general. The theorem settles the Eighteenth-Century problem by standing it on its head. That problem was, How do we manage, from this particular concrete thing and that particular concrete thing and the other particular concrete thing, to arrive at the general abstract anything? The theorem holds that we begin with the general abstract any-thing, split it, as the world makes us, into sorts and then arrive at concrete particulars by the overlapping or common membership of these sorts. This bit of paper here now in my hand is a concrete particular to us so far as we think of it as paperish, hereish, nowish, and in my hand; it is the more concrete as we t

All thinking from the lowest to the highest-whatever else it may be-is sort-ing.

What is the connection between the mind and the world by which events in the mind mean other events in the world?

If, then, you seem in the next half hour at times merely to be hearing words as sounds that come and go, I must beg your indulgence, or buy it with the promise that we shall come out again to practical problems in the everyday conduct of words.

What follows is unavoidably abstract and general in the extreme.

a little book

The review an_d correspondence columns of the learned and sci-entific journals are the places in which to watch this poaching at its liveliest.

other people,

Those who allow beyond question that there arc people like themselves also interpreting signs and open to study should not find it difficult to admit that their observation of the behaviour of others may provide at least a framework within which their own introspection,

4~1.,.b\i

And what are words but toys and sweetmeats for grown-up ba-bies who call themselves men?

natural symbol-ism

volition

Between the symbol and the referent there is no relevant relation other than the indirect one, which com,ists in it~ being used by someone to ~land for a referent.

ut for the analysis of the senses of "meaning" with which we are here chiefly concerned, it is desirable to begin with the relations of thoughts, words, and things as they are found in cases of reflective speech un-complicated by emotional, diplomatic, or other disturbances; and with regard to these, the indi-rectness of the relations between words and things is the feature which first deserves atten-tion.

Words, as every one now knows, "mean" nothing by them-selves, although the belief that they did, as we shall see in the next chapter, was once equally universal.

Thoughts and Things.'

There is no doubt an Art in saying something when there is nothing to be said,

to say something even when there is hardly anything to say

studied cartooning at the Disney studios

immediate verbal environment,

Meaning may thus be depen-dent on context, but some contexts, it seems, are more appropriate than others.

reference

Meaning does not reside in the words or signs themselves; to believe that it does is to fall victim to the "proper meaning su-perstition," the belief that words have inherent meaning.

o field of study seemed for-eign to him, and his many books and articles are marked by his continuing enthusi-asm for psychology, linguistics, anthropology, information theory, and philosophy.

money

You can't do this and you shan't do that! Fellows and scholars only allowed on the grass

At any rate, she was making the attempt.

Be truthful, one would say, and the result is bound to be amazingly interest-ing.

Woman becomes much more various and complicated there.

But how interesting it would have been if the re-lationship between the two women had been more complicated.

here will be time for that when I have decided whether she has a pen in her hand or a pickaxe.

But there is a difference. Miss Richard-son has fashioned her sentence consciously, in order that it may descend to the depths and investi-gate the crannies of Miriam Henderson's con-sciousness.

But, then, which reality is it, the superfi-cial or the profound?

All these things are cast away, and there is left, denuded, unsheltered, unbegun and unfinished, the consciousness of Miriam Henderson, the small sensitive lump of matter,

It was untaught; it was from the heart.

living a free life as a soldier

Again, with memoirs and letters to help us, we are beginning to understand how abnor-mal is the effort needed to produce a work of art, and what shelter and what support the mind of the artist requires.

The answer lies at present locked in old diaries, stuffed away in old draw-ers, half-obliterated in the memories of the aged. It is to be found in the lives of the obscure-in those almost unlit corridors of history where the figures of generations of women are so dimly, so fitfully perceived.

ing questions to which we shall get, as answer, only further fiction.

phan-toms

hope I am not giving away professional secrets if I say that a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible.

You have only got to figure to yourselves a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand. She had only to move that pen from left to right-from ten o'clock to one.

so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living.

She was intensely sympa-thetic. She was immensely charming. She was ut-terly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it-in short she was so consti-tuted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all- I need not say it-she was pure.

independent of male support

above all else Woolf abhorred egotism, which she saw as the male besetting sin

Moreover, Woolf believes that the principal language available for literary and intellectual expression has been "the language of men,"s so long used to express only men's concerns that women have difficulty adapting it to their needs.

imitate

Also showing Lamy's inllucncc is Astcll'!. view that one needs little stylistic ornament because people arc naturally attracted to truth if they can sec it clearly.

Mar 02, 201

con-struct arguments very similar to one another-

Hunger is not simply a tf.-l, ,·5 HUbE physiological fact, the same in all cases, but is interpreted by the hungry person in .:¥,. ( "'~ .~ c. ...... + the context or a system of social meanings

Finally, he concludes that knowl-edge itself is based upon argument, and that there is considerable ethical and ideo-logical danger in the tendency or most arguments lo claim that they rest on im-mutable truth.

When Weaver argues that language is sermonic (the title of hi~ influential 1 963 essay), he means that all instances of language use arc persuasive. rhetorical, and therefore imbued with ethical values.

Narration is essential to both rhetoric and poetic.

The other conclusion, adopted by the "ordinary language" philosophers, is that use determines mcuning. Wittgenstein in his later work takes this' position, and speech-act theorist J. L. Austin is one of its most important defender!>

Thus in metaphysics a persistent concern has been to determine the relationship between real things and the linguistic expressions that (presumably) name them.

philosophers arc now more likely to ask what it means to speak of a concept, to define the tenns that identify concepts, and to be self-conscious about semantic problems that arise in dealing with concepts.

He understands the principles of linguistic change-for example, the tendency for slang terms to be-come part of the reputable vocabulary-and he addresses a practical problem that teachers of rhetoric have yet to solve, namely, the conflict between descriptive lin-guistics and the need to leach usage.